Chapter 2

Thoughts and Applications on the Tao Te Jing through the lens of Master Zhu's Teachings and Translation.

Everyone under heaven (天下) knows why beauty/goodness is good because it is relative to ugliness/evilness.

Everyone knows why kindness is kind because it is relative to unkindness.

So, existence (presence) and nonexistence (absence) promote each other.

Difficult and easy achieve each other.

Long and short compare each other.

High and low flip each other.

Sound and song coordinate each other.

Front and back follow each other.

So, the Sage does things of non-action (Wu-Wei) and does not interrupt nature’s natural flow.

Educating without language.

The Universe runs without explanations.

Everything in the Universe is born from Wuji and operates without explanation.

Live without relying on achievements.

Do not dwell on the achievements of past accomplishments.

Dwelling on past accomplishments leads to successes remaining incomplete.

• Master Zhu Xilin Translation

Some Commentary…

Everyone under the heaven (天下) knows why beauty/goodness is good, because it is relative to ugliness/evilness.

Everyone knows why kindness is kind, because it is relative to unkindness.

Here we have the ideas of Yin-Yang pairs (Figure 1). Was there a time before we knew beauty existed? Was there a time before we knew good existed? From the Taoist perspective we see our mind in action creating differences (Yin-Yang pairs) from a relative state of absence (Wuji). This is the relationship between the mind and spirt, where our mind categorizes the perceptions of our spirit. The spirt here is our senses working together as we witness the world. Our mind compares, organizes, and categorizes these perceptions.

Figure 1

So, existence (presence) and nonexistence (absence) promote each other.

Difficult and easy achieve each other.

Long and short compare each other.

High and low flip each other.

Sound and song coordinate each other.

Front and back follow each other.

Here we see the idea of Wuji in relation to the yin/yang pair. Absence is presented as a relative state with presence, creating a yin/yang pair. When I first started reading Taoist translations it seemed like I was reading lists of Yin/Yang pairs similar to this passage. It was later I realized they are a relationship between Wuji and Yin/Yang. Now I think of these statements as Wuji-taiji-Yin/Yang pattern that shows the shape our mind. The mind is how we understand and categorize the world and our senses are how we sense the world.

Sometime in my study I asked myself the question is the “Tao” real? Or is it an idea manufactured in the minds of humans? We live in a vast universe whose essence is infinite and flows in and out of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. We watch the world and witness the changes as they unfold around us. We sense the coolness in the darkness of night and the warmth and light of day. We follow the seasons and see the cycles of change in the world. We see the cycles of birth-life-death in our families. Is this a creation of our minds or the patterns in the world? I think it is both. I think we are part of the world and we follow the same patterns of change as the world we witness. I think the stream of consciousness that flows through us is similar to the streams and rivers that flow through mountain canyons. I think the Taoist practice is observational, a practice that seeks to understand who we are in relation to the natural world. I also think the concepts that developed from these observations are hard wired into who we are as human beings, I think the Tao is the shape of our understanding.

It's the pattern of (absence-presence-absence) that opens these ideas. As an example, every day we can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west. If we think of the sunset as a state of presence within the universe and the non-sunset the absence, we see the pattern of wuji-taiji-yin/yang. If you thought about a sunset as you read the last sentence you can see the pattern of absence of the thought of the sunset, changing into the presence emerging into the thought of a sunset, as your mind moves on the idea of the sunset retreats into absence. This is the same pattern, wuji-taiji-yin/yang of our perceptions that mirror the wuji-taiji-yin/yang patterns in the natural world.

So, the Sage does things of non-action (Wu-Wei) and does not interrupt nature’s natural flow.

Educating without language.

What is a Sage? The definition online is: A wise person who demonstrates wisdom through reflection and experience. The statement “The Sage does things of non-action” tells us what a Sage does but it is unclear, and we need some theory to understand this statement. I think in the Taoist tradition:

A Sage is a human being who studies the Tao. Who practiced Taoist techniques to achieve a relative state and understanding of Wuji within themselves. Then they follow that knowledge to an understanding of their relation with the natural world.

From this statement we can unravel what a Sage does and how they function in the world. For me the Taoist practice of meditation, relaxing through repetitive movement, and stretching are the path to understanding Wuji within ourselves. I wrote about these ideas in the essay Unraveling Into Harmony. The practice is a way of finding yourself within the programming, ideas, and patterns of the modern world. Through the practice as you let go of dogmatic ideas and old emotional patterns you reach a point when you stop looking at your internal world, you look outside yourself and see the world with a different lens. The world shifts into a balance showing itself in all its magnificence. It’s the harmony you find within that reveals the harmony and balance of the natural world. You become a human being that lives between an understanding of yourself, the relation to the world of man, and the natural world. (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The rest of the statement “The Sage does things of non-action (Wu-Wei) and does not interrupt nature’s natural flow.” I think is an understanding of who we are in relation to the reality of the natural world. A Sage witnessing the harmony and seeing the natural world in its constant state of change, understands anything we do is a sliver of intention in the vastness of the eternal possibilities. They then let the flow of change happen around and through them. They live like a leaf caught in the current, cascading here and there with the flow. This is the relation between the Sage and the natural world. If the world of man follows the same patterns of change, they conduct themselves in this same way. They become a living understanding of who they are in their culture or society. It’s their understanding of who they are within the natural world that guides their trajectories, teaching this relative understanding comes through their actions, decisions, and interactions.

The Universe runs without explanations.

Do we know why seeds grow into plants? Do we know why plants photosynthesis sunlight? Do we know why sex and the interaction between males and females leads to offspring? These are existential questions we can only speculate on. Can you imagine a world without human beings there to witness it? Can you imagine the Universe without human beings striving to understand the machinations of the world? The World/Universe was around before I was born. Our explanations are only speculations. Our questions are the questions of human beings. We may not even have the ability to ask the questions we would need to understand the Universe. The Universe does not need our explanations to operate.

Everything in the Universe is born from Wuji and operates without explanation.

From where I am now Wuji is the key to everything. It’s the nothing that comes before God. It’s the root of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. I think about when I think about physics and the big bang. I observe it in my creativity, every creative act interacts with Wuji as it’s root. What can we know about the root of creativity? It comes and goes as we interact with Wuji. If we strip everything we understand from the knowledge of humanity, we become nameless beings on a nameless planet. Everything we know becomes a creative act of understanding. The pureness of an empty mind seeking understanding manufactures order to relieve the anxiety of the unknown. In this thought experiment every idea or understanding follows this same pattern. It’s our mind that creates the explanation. The Universe flows as it does, we follow our human nature and strive to understand and explain it.

Live without relying on achievements.

Do not dwell on the achievements of past accomplishments.

Dwelling on past accomplishments leads to successes remaining incomplete.

I looked at numerous translations of this last passage, I was unsure what the concepts, the order and ideas were jumbled and confusing. My first thought was that they were referring to the mind of a Sage and the origin of ideas.

In my life I have played a lot of chess, I would say during my playing days “The worse thing you can do in a chess game is think.”. For me chess was a creative output, I would see the board and pieces as fractals, possibilities flowing in time. I found that I could form my mind in the shape of the problem or situation, I would then let my mind drift or daydream around that shape. It was this dream state and the shape of the problem that was the creative piece that opened into the door to “seeing” interesting possibilities. It was like watching a river of consciousness flow around me, when some move that seemed interesting flowed by I would pluck it out of the stream and examine it. It was the drifting of my mind I now recognize as the Wuji state of the mind. This holding of the shape of the mind was my first thought on this passage.

When I sent the passage to Master Zhu the above is his translation. His translation points to who we are as beings in a constant state of change. We are surrounded and engulfed by change, every aspect of our reality or perception conforms to some state of change/transformation. It is from this perspective we can view achievements with the idea:

Any cessation in the natural flow of change leads to stagnations and imbalances.

Every system fails, every society falls. We see this in the Urban Decay within our cities, we see it in the cracks that form in old concrete, we see it as nature peeks through the veil of our civilization. It’s these imbalances and stagnations that lead to failure. I think this last passage at the root is a call for us to stop, to rest, learn to move on.