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Each week we address one chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Chapter 27 was originally featured on the 2nd week in July, 2004.
Note: The Tao Te Ching can be obscure, especially if you think you're supposed to understand what it's saying! We find it easier and more instructive to simply contemplate how the chapter resonates with your personal experience. Becoming more aware at this fundamental level simplifies life. This approach conforms to the view that true knowing lies within ourselves. Thus, when a passage in the scripture resonates, you've found your inner truth. The same applies for when it evokes a question; questions are the grist for self realization.
Chapter 27
One who excels in travelling leaves no wheel tracks;
One who excels in speech makes no slips;
One who excels in reckoning uses no counting rods;
One who excels in shutting uses no bolts
yet what he has shut cannot be opened.
One who excels in tying uses no cords
yet what he has tied cannot be undone.
Therefore the sage always excels in saving people, and so abandons no one;
always excels in saving things, and so abandons nothing.
This is called following one's discernment.
Hence the good man is the teacher the bad learns from;
And the bad man is the material the good works on.
Not to value the teacher
Nor to love the material
Though it seems clever, betrays great bewilderment.
This is called the essential and the secret.
Discernment is the key word here for me. How I discern my circumstances determines how 'perfectly' matched I feel to them,... to the nature of how 'things' are, as opposed to how I want them to be. For example, excelling in speech does not mean how perfect my speech is by some objective standard. Rather, a sense of myself making no slips hinges on how much I need to excel. If I give up the 'glory' and the responsibility of excelling and being perfect, I'm also liberated from the 'shame' of failure and slips. Holding to one spawns the other.
Discernment is my path to abandoning no one or nothing, and not some activist attempt on my part to go and save people or things. The moments when I abandon are when I'm not present and attentive to each thing I do, thing I touch, or person I deal with.
Talk of the good and bad harken back to Chapter 2, for me. What else could following one's discernment bring, in the end, but bewilderment? It is little wonder that I can end up feeling tentative, as if fording a river in winter,...
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