Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 17

17

When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

Next best is a leader who is loved.

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,

you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.

When his work is done,

the people say, "Amazing:

we did it all, all by ourselves.

Commentary

A. Lincoln: a great Leader

These stanzas of the seventeenth poem are a reflection on good leadership and all that it entails.  Over a 35 year career I have observed many leaders at work in a school setting.  The best leaders amongst them worked away unobserved most of the time and they achieved much. The worst of them were micro-managers seeking to control others.  Managers who were into control and power, or to put it in other words, were obsessed with their own EGO were disliked, caused acrimony among the staff and achieved little.  The above poem is a very perspicacious and wise comment on the style of a good manager where the term "Master" can be substituted easily with the word "manager." 

Conclusion

Once again I invite the reader of this blog to read over the above poem meditatively and to pick out a favourite word or phrase and to use the same as a mantra for a short period of reflection, say five or ten minutes.  Namaste, friends.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 16

16

Empty your mind of all thoughts.

Let your heart be at peace.

Watch the turmoil of beings,

but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe

returns to the common source.

Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don't realise the source,

you stumble in confusion and sorrow.

When you realise where you com from,

you naturally become tolerant,

disinterested, amused,

kindhearted as a grandmother,

dignified as a king.

Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,

you can deal with whatever life brings you,

and when death comes, you are ready.

Reflection

Once again, the writers of the Tao Te Ching return to an old and constant theme, namely the achieving of a state of emptiness.  The writer of the above poet recommends that his hearers and readers empty their mind of thoughts.  The intention is to slow down the racing thoughts, to still the mind and eventually with practice to empty it of the distractions of continuous and interrupting thoughts.  The whole effort of meditation then is to allow the meditator to become an observer of life and of the thoughts that come and go, and in so observing to get beyond them to a state of stillness or emptiness or serenity.  Some modern traditions call the meditator the Witness.  This stillness or emptiness or serenity allows the meditator to be objective and to watch unmoved and not to become taken in by the turmoil of the lives and minds  of those who chase the impulses and ambitions of the ego.

Another word for meditation is contemplation.  In some traditions, like that of the spirituality associated with the Roman Catholic Church, these two words represent different approaches to prayer.  Here, I am using them synonymously and interchangeably.   There are many metaphors used for the path to the state of Enlightenment: striving to reach the Still Point; attempting to experience true emptiness; the return journey to the source or walking the path to serenity.  In our dying and death we will certainly be entering the portals leading to Serenity if we have the courage to embrace it.  We have all originally come from the one and the same source, whatever that may be, whether we call it by the name of God or any other appellation, and indeed we will all return to it at the last breath of our mortal lives. Realising that both our source and destination are the same for every sentient and conscious being, we readily leave aside all confusion and sorrow, become way more tolerant and compassionate to both self and others, objective, amused even, and kindhearted as "a grandmother." 

I have already mentioned many times in these pages the old quotation that Plato attributed to Socrates, namely that all true philosophy begins in wonder.  It is not very unusual then  - given the links between what we may term the perennial or practical wisdom side of philosophy on the one hand and spirituality and religion on the other -  that the Tao Te Ching should declare that once the disciples of meditation have immersed themselves in this basic attitude of wonder that they will be able to much more easily deal with whatever "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" life throws at them.  Moreover, our Taoist poet maintains that "when death comes" these disciples of the Way/Tao will be ready.

By way of conclusion, I once again invite the reader to peruse the above poem and allow a word, phrase or line to present itself as a mantra for a five or ten minute meditation period. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 15

Poem 15

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle,

their wisdom was unfathomable.

There is no way to describe it;

all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful 

as someone crossing an iced-over stream.

Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.

Courteous as a guest.

Fluid as melting ice.

Shapable as a block of wood.

Receptive as a valley.

Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfilment.

Not seeking, not expecting,

she is present, and can welcome all things.

Reflections

Image of Lao Tzu

The clarion call of the Eastern religious and spiritual systems and traditions is to "wake up!", to "become aware!" or  to "open our eyes and unblock our ears!"  Awareness is all.  Indeed, Socrates' call to his hearers to "know themselves" and not to live an "unexamined life" shares in this call to awareness to a great extent.  T.S. Eliot penned an interesting line in his great poem, The Four Quartets viz., "the sudden illumination - //We had the experience but missed the meaning" is a sentiment that shares in this common call to reflecting on our experiences or to self-reflection.  When we meditate we are learning to become aware, to wake up, to open our eyes and unblock our ears.

T. S. Eliot

To cross a stream that's covered with ice requires very careful attention to where one places one's feet.  Our author in the above Taoist poem also admits that the really aware person exercises the careful attention of a warrior on enemy territory.  Such an aware person is certainly never rude or angry as s/he is "courteous as a guest." Awareness calls not just for the keen skills of observation, but for a gentleness of being, a congruence and authenticity of living that openness to all the sentient creatures of the world requires.

There is an interesting and important contrast between rigidity and fluidity brought out in the above poem.  Modern psychology notes that those who are at risk of developing health problems, both physical and mental, belong to a group of persons who have a certain characteristic of temperament, namely rigidity.  The above ancient text recognizes this fact and it says that the old Masters showed great "fluidity" or flexibility in their approach to living.  There is also the related saying from Confucius that recommends the same flexibility or fluidity that goes: "The green reed that bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm."  We could learn much from this simple wisdom.

Image of Confucius

When we meditate we learn slowly, indeed very slowly to still our senses and our mind.  In this regard we need much continued practice.  In doing so, we allow, as the Taoist poet says in the above  lines, "the mud to settle and the water to become clear."  However, this is no easy or quick process but one that requires our continued application to meditative practices that promote awareness.

By way of conclusion, let me invite the reader to reflectively read the above Taoist poem and let a word, phrase or line offer itself as a mantra for ten minute period of meditation.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 14

Poem 14

Look, and it can't be seen.

Listen and it can't be heard.

Reach and it can't be grasped.

Above, it isn't bright.

Below, it isn't dark.

Seamless, unnameable,

it returns to the realm of nothing.

Form that includes all forms,

image without an image,

subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;

follow it and there is no end.

You can't know it, but you can be it,

at ease in your own life.

Just realise where you come from:

this is the essence of wisdom.

Reflections

I have remarked already that the poems of the Tao Te Ching bear some little similarity to the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament.  However, they also contrast with the psalms in one major respect. Take the following quotation about wisdom from Psalm 111:10 for example: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth forever.”  Notice here that the Psalms are essentially theocentric (or God-centered) in their approach to answering the mystery with which life confronts us, while the Tao Te Ching  is essentially anthropocentric. The last two lines of the final stanza above tells us that the essence of wisdom lies not in the fear of an external power like that of God, but rather in the internal realisation of one's depth of being. This is not surprising given the more psychological or anthropocentric approach of Eastern spirituality.

The above poem is basically describing the elusiveness of the Tao.  It also indicates its ineffability and mystery by using once again that union of opposites, that tension of polarities, that balance of binaries or axis of antinomies to which I have alluded many times in these reflections.  This tension of opposites essentially, then, captures skillfully the elusiveness and ineffability of the Tao. 

Raphael's painting, "The School of Athens." Plato is the bearded central figure

"Image without an image" is paradoxical in the extreme, though it bears some little parallelism with the thought of Plato.  Plato believed that any object was but a physical representation of the abstract idea which was in a sense "more real" that the actual material thing.  For example, a physical table is a representation of the abstract idea of table (the original form). In consequence art was very much a cheap representation as it was merely a copy of a copy of the original image or idea. [Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract (but substantial) forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form or idea is often capitalized.] Image of an image we can all understand as we can a copy of a copy.  However, image without an image is working as it were in the other direction towards the original idea or form which needless to say is totally ineffable and totally indescribable.  Once again, it is worth repeating here that when we are dealing with religious, psychological and spiritual depths we put language under great strain to express them.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 13

Poem 13

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self.

When we don't see the self as self,

what do we have to fear?

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things.

Reflections

These poems from the Tao Te Ching are designed to make the reader or indeed listener (as in those ancient times when these lines were written oral cultures abounded, as only the very rich or people of status were able to read) think; to snap the person into a state of wakefulness or awareness.  Koans, which can be in the form of a story, a question, a statement or even a dialogue, were traditionally used in Zen Buddhism to provoke the disciple into a deeper awareness or a keener sense of wakefulness than heretofore.  In this way, the student's progress in Zen practice was tested. To my mind, the poems in the Tao Te Ching share in that purpose, namely to test and to deepen the student's progress in wisdom. The above poem is quite koanic (if this word exists) or koan-like  in this regard. 

Objectivity

All meditative practices allow us to withdraw a considerable distance from our own ego or from our obsession with self, from our egocentricity.  If we can arrive at this stage of personal or spiritual development, we have become more objective about ourselves and are less likely on the one hand to swell up with pride when we are praised by another or on the other hand retreat in failure into gloomy despair when criticized.   In that sense we can meet success and failure in our stride and not be too overcome in either an overly positive or overly negative sense.  Another way of stating these objective sentiments would be by making the paradoxical or koanic statement that "success is a dangerous as failure."  Once again, it's a question of not clinging onto or obsessively desiring those allurements or charms of the ego.  In that sense, success can be dangerous to our discovering real happiness, which lies in discovering the real or true self that is hidden behind all the empty promises of our ego-ridden society.  Failure can be crippling to the ego and reduce it to a state of not being able to do this or that.  We want to keep the ego in a healthy place in our psyche, and we certainly don't want to cripple it.  In fact, when we learn to give it its proper place in the psyche, balanced well astride the super-ego and id, then we can function confidently in life.  We have to learn to be ruthlessly objective and never allow our failures to have any negative effect on our real and true selves.  This takes some work in both personal development and on-going meditative practice to achieve. 

Our Taoist poet tells us also that "hope can be as hollow as fear."  In other words, the poet is telling us that unfounded fear or anxiety can reduce a person to an ineffective and passive on-looker rather than an active participant in society.  Unfounded hope can be mere wishful thinking and lead us into despair.   

Stanza three is pure koan and will only yield up a little of its wisdom after meditating upon it many times.  Therefore, I am offering no explanation here, or attempted explanation even, as I have to humbly, like Socrates, admit my ignorance.  What I will do is meditate and pray on it and leave it to the great Unconscious (or God, or Meaningfulness, or the spirit of life or whatever you wish to call it) to offer up some suggestive answer.

It is also my opinion that the Taoist poet uses the "self" in two differing ways in this poem. Stanza three seems to suggest that when we go beyond the self, or beyond being preoccupied or even concerned with self that it is only then that we have nothing to fear.  Stanza four recommends, in a rather contradictory sense, that we must see all things in the world from the perspective of the self that it is only then that we can really love everything and everyone. This last stanza, then, is in the tradition of Jesus' famous command to his disciples to love their neighbour as themselves.

John Keats: 1795 - 1821

However, as we all know by now, it is in the tradition of Taoist wisdom, as it is in that of Zen Buddhism, to hold the two opposites in a polar tension or union.  Therefore, as readers of this beautiful Taoist poem, we are happy to remain in a state of what the famous ill-fated wonderful Romantic poet John Keats called "negative capability," a term he coined himself for the learnt ability in the human mind to balance opposites and hold them thus "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." (see Negative Capability)

Conclusion:

One again, by way of conclusion, I invite the reader to read reflectively through the above Taoist lines and let a word or phrase spark a mantra for a five or ten minute meditation.

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 12

Poem 12

Colours blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavours numb the taste.

Thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.

The Master observes the world

but trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

Reflections:

My father used often say that too much of anything is never good for us.  It is a truism worth repeating that moderation is possibly the best key to life in order to open up all its possibilities.  There is something in us that drives us to want more and more and more. That drive is more than likely part of our primordial instinct to survive. We all want success in life and some of us equate that with status, position in society or wealth.  One just has to take a few steps back and observe how obsessive people become about all of these things. Human beings, in building up an identity, accumulate all of the aforementioned and further a lot of our number become driven to acquire more and more.  And yet none of these things in themselves, either singly, or together necessarily brings us happiness.  Something else is needed.  Onto this scene, then, enter the various religions and spiritualities that seek to offer paths to happiness.   

Attachment and Detachment

Once again, let us return to the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism which reflects the message intended by the above Taoist poem.  This truth insists that there is a definite cause to human suffering and, that is, that all our desires and cravings are based on our ignorance of reality. This ignorance causes us to cling to the things of the world like wealth and success and all their appurtenances  as that which is truly valuable and real.  This Second Truth, also known as Samudaya, tells us that we will be hurt proportionately to the intensity of our attachment or clinging to all these things. Craving can be for sensual experiences like love, money, comfort, success, fame, power and all sorts of pleasant feelings.  Or there can be a craving for being/becoming that leads to a craving that life will continue forever, that there will be an eternal life.

The standard rendering of the Second Noble Truth is that dukkha (suffering or stress) is caused by greed or desire.  Apparently, the actual word for this desire is "tanha," but it is more accurately translated as "thirst" or "craving."  This truth is not telling us that we must give up everything we love and then go live an ascetic life in order to find happiness.  The real issue for us here is far more subtle - it is the issue of our attachment to what we desire and it is this attachment that we must learn to control because if we don't it gets us into trouble (stress or suffering). 

Trees: Newbridge House

In commenting on the above Taoist poem in a rhetorical way, we may say that more and more colours won't necessarily make our lives more colourful; more and more sounds won't necessarily add to the harmony; more and more flavours won't necessarily make the food tastier; more and more thoughts won't necessarily make the mind more intellectually profound nor will more and more desires necessarily make the heart grow fonder. 

Inner versus Outer

St Augustine tells us that he searched for God (we may use this term as a metaphor for meaning if you like) everywhere in the world, through the satisfaction of all the senses and his intellect, but finally found him within, in his own inner self or soul.  He described his way of meditating as that of "interiority." Like the Taoist poet he trusted his "inner vision." All of meditation is about going on that inner or interior journey, that journey down to the real or inner self or still point of being below or above (depending on your preferred spatial metaphor) all our agitated and agitating thoughts.

Candles: Vienna Cathedral

Openness

It is so hard to be open about things: to be open to the self, to others, to the world, to life, to the universe or to whatever is its underlying power.  And yet, that openness is the fruit of much meditation and the promise of all great traditions of spiritual practices.  The intention of this poem is that our hearts too will be "as open as the sky."

Conclusion

In these final lines, I will once again invite the reader to peruse the above poem and let any word, phrase or line strike your attention and then to use that as a mantra for a short ten minute meditation.

Namaste, Friends. 

Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 11

Poem 11

We join spokes together in a wheel, 

but it is the centre hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want,

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Reflections:

Once again when it comes to the big questions of life, like the" why" of it, we are singularly at a loss, and are indeed left existentially in a chasm of doubt or in an abyss of mystery that can invite different responses according to our culture and our physical/mental make-up.  Some will respond by faith in a religious deity, others by an atheism that denies all possible design by a higher power and still others will declare their inability to be sure about what life is about at all - that position is known as agnosticism.  In between these three major options a myriad of other nuanced positions can be held.  None of us, as we grow older, will be satisfied with asking merely the "how" questions of science and digesting their rather dry bland answers alone.  We somehow desire and demand  a more appetizing and tastier meal of knowledge.  In this regard, we are in the company of the great Nobel Prize winner for Theoretical Physics, Richard Feynman who declared: "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned!"  This statement appeals to me because it shows the thrust towards knowledge and truth which, I would argue, is at the centre of all good religious inquiry as well as that of the sciences.  I would also believe firmly in the contention of the great nineteenth century theologian and scholar, John Henry Newman, that no truth in any area of human exploration into knowledge can contradict another truth found in another area of such exploration: he declared that no truth can contradict another truth as such was axiomatic by very definition of truth in the first place.

And so we return to the paradoxes and the unity of opposites or of binaries or of polarities. I have spoken of this concept many times in the preceding posts. A partial list of such polarities would be:

• Light vs Dark
• Night vs day
• Clear vs Opaque
• Heavy vs Light
• Good vs Bad/Evil
• Rigid vs Flexible
• Emptiness vs Fullness

The poem above returns us once again to the image of the wheel which is a wonderful symbol for life which continues to persist and perdure in a cyclical sense.  The paradox at the heart of the first stanza of the above poem is worth repeating: "it is the centre hole that makes the wagon move."  This is obviously paradoxical.  I remember once, when attempting to write on the mystery of suffering as an undergraduate in philosophy and theology, coming across the image of a word carved in stone which sought to contend that the word itself exists for us in the emptiness carved from the stone.  I also remember finding an image of the word "evil" carved in stone in some book or other.  What these artists and authors were getting at is the Augustinian theory/theodicy that evil is simply a lack of the good that should be there in the first place: "MALUM EST PRIVATIO BONI."

In the second stanza above, we are presented with the image of the emptiness in the pot having the potential to hold the substance of its contents.  The potential of emptiness for fullness is also paradoxical and essentially mysterious, belonging to the sense of wonder which is the beginning of all philosophy and indeed of all knowledge.

And then we are faced with the final paradox that Being and non-Being are the major balance of opposites that we encounter in human existence.  That tension of polarities suffuses everything we do in life.  Life occurs somewhere somehow as the very energy that shoots between both those poles of Being (Life) and Death (Non-Being).  In a sense, to live is to die and mortality is central to what life essentially means.  I wrote more fully on this particular tension by way of reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics HERE in this blog so I shan't run the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam. 

Meditating on non-being as well as being is important, and that's the reason why Buddhists place a lot of significance upon the student in search of enlightenment learning to meditate upon his/her dying and death.  Such a meditation is never in any way morose or depressing as it essentially liberates the meditator to more fully live in the "now" and to embrace the presence of his/her existence.

Conclusion: One again I invite the reader of these few words to re-read the above Taoist poem and to let a remembered word or phrase or line act as a mantra for a meditation session of say five or ten minutes.