Gentle reader, bear with me whilst I deliver a mini-series of three posts about the Dao, mindfulness and suchlike stuff. I hope it may be of use to you, even if at first it looks a bit - well, you know, remote from where you are today - wondering where the cat's got to, regretting what you said at that awful meeting yesterday, and firing off an email about an unpaid bill....all small beer compared to daily life in the ancient China of the turbulent Spring and Autumn/Warring States period.
If you lived
in a time of seemingly endless, vicious and chaotic local wars, you might well
value a set of insights that emphasised stillness, led you away from
polarization and dissent, and gave you a sense of an underlying, enduring
reality beyond the reach of feuding and bloodshed.
That’s not just our
world I'm describing above, that’s China about 2,500 years ago, and a series of some 80 brief
statements forming a very short “book” that may or may not have been written by
a man called Lao Tsu (Laotzi) who millions of ordinary Chinese people came to
revere as a god, one of the three Taoist immortals. But his identity as a deity
is part of what the experts call a folk religion. More helpful to us today in
the West is his value as a true mystic, a mystic’s mystic, one might trivially
say. His book is usually called the Tao Te Ching, or Dao De Jing.
There may not
even have been a man called Laotzi. Or there may have been, but perhaps he
didn’t write one book called the Dao De Jing (DDJ), which may have been a
collecting together of Taoist sayings that were around at the time.Bit like "was there a Homer, or were there Homers?" Doesn't really matter, for our purposes.
Parts of the Dao
seem almost incomprehensible; it is difficult to interpret something so old,
and the sets of meanings people bring to it change so much down the centuries. To
some degree, we find in it what we set out to look for, not what is fixed
there. But that’s true of any text; no
book is fixed, outside time and beyond change, and each of us changes a text
when we read it.
We will find
common ground in the DDJ that we can agree is valuable to us today, we will
find some bits that really don’t help a lot, and some bits that don’t have a
lot of meaning for us unless we are a ruler or his advisor in China millennia
ago.
Perhaps Laotzi
might have laughed gleefully at our head-scratching over difficulties of
translation and varying interpretations. “Of course,” he might say, “that’s the
point. Have you not read the book, or rather: have you not let it read you?”
Some parts of
the DDJ don’t seem particularly mystical; they seem eminently sensible, if
almost impossibly hard to achieve, in the world of daily politico-social
realities, in particular, war and violence:
Lean
years follow in the wake of a great war.
Just
do what needs to be done.
Never take advantage of power.
But then
there’s:
Force
is followed by loss of strength.
This
is not the way of Dao.
That
which goes against the Dao
Comes
to an early end.
So what is
this Dao? It is the Way – and already we are in trouble, because the DDJ is
attempting to teach through words and concepts. But it is teaching us about
that which, it tells us, underlies all words and concepts, contains all
opposing qualities. So:
The
way that can be told is not the eternal way.
The name that can be named is not
the eternal name.
The
nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth…
The Dao is at
the beginning of everything, and it won’t be captured in our language,
identified as a word, tied down with our descriptive or rational concepts. Because:
Look,
it cannot be seen – it is beyond form.
Listen,
it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound.
Grasp,
it cannot be held – it is intangible.
From
above it is not bright;
From
below it is not dark.
Lao Tzi is
trying to encourage in us a state of mind that is beyond conceptual, linear
thought. This Way of his: our senses cannot contain or define it, and it can’t
be reached through our usual habits of defining something through polarising
opposites. We often say “if something isn’t A then its B.” The Dao seems to be
both A and B at once. It came before the forms and shapes – the “ten thousand
things” or “myriad creatures" frequently referred to in the DDJ. It is also
beyond time:
Stay
with the ancient way,
Move
with the present.
End of part 1. If you haven't come across the DDJ before, you may be puzzled or irritated by now. In which case, good - more soon! And if you have, do feel free to put me right where I'm wrong.
