What is the tao (Part 4)
This is Part 4 of my inquiry into the nature of the "way" or tao. (See Part 3 here.) My topic this time: the essentialness of "knowing when to stop."Chapter 44 of the Tao te ching or Lao-tzu reads, in part:
Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.
(See the full chapter text and commentary here.)
According to D.C Lau
in the introduction to his Penguin Classics translation of the Lao-tzu, shown at right:
The precept in the Lao-tzu is that we should hold fast to the submissive. (p. xxiii)By this he means that Taoism values the submissive (Chinese jou or rou) above just about everything. Close synonyms for "submissive" are "weak" and "bent." The submissive, the weak, and the bent, as qualities of the neverending tao, eventually overcome the stubborn, the strong, and the straight.
Hence he or she who wants to live out his days and not have them unnecessarily shortened will be "submissive," "weak," and "bent," like the tao itself. For the Lao-tzu, says Lau, is first and foremost a manual for keeping on keeping on. To make this crucial point he notes, "It was to the solution of this problem of survival [in the turbulent Warring States period] that much of the wisdom of the Lao-tzu was directed" (p. xxvii). Lau adds, "The supreme goal for the common man as well as for the ruler is survival, and the means to this goal is simply to hold fast to the submissive" (p. xxxvi).
Keeping this fact in mind may help to offset much of the abstract, high-flown philosophizing I engaged in in previous installments of this series. As the back cover of Lau's Penguin Classics edition states, "As a treatise both on personal conduct and on government [the Lao-tzu] is moral rather than mystical in tone, and advances a philosophy of meekness as the surest path to survival."
To that I would add that "personal conduct," in the Lao-tzu, is a form of "government" — government of the self — so that they are in fact one and the same topic. I would also add that "ethical" might be a better word to use than "moral," which carries overtones of scrupulosity and censure which are absent from the Lao-tzu. The Lao-tzu is as a result an intensely practical — albeit elusive — guide to "right" conduct, where the latter is defined as that which allows us to endure in a universe which proceeds from, by, and according to the tao.
It is in this context that "knowing contentment" and "knowing when to stop" become more than mere mottoes and facile shibboleths. They are the sine qua non of survival.
Another word for the quality the Lao-tzu extols as submissiveness is "suppleness." This is what the Lao-tzu means by saying
One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a new born babe. (ch. 55)
or
If you are a ravine to the empire,
Then the constant virtue will not desert you
And you will again return to being a babe. (ch. 28)
| jou or rou "supple, pliant, submissive" |
A baby is supple, even rubbery, and can survive rough handling. A dead person is just the opposite: rigid. In between comes the brittle state of the old.
Moral: if you want to live long, move in the direction of cultivating the suppleness of a newborn babe.
posted by eric @ 8:30 AM
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