Monthly Chapter-71

Realizing I don’t’ know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
Man alone faults this disease; this so as not to be ill.
The sacred person is not ill, taking his disease as illness.
Man alone has this disease; this is because to him there is no illness.

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Limits: Translations, even my nearly literal one above, invariably lose some of the ancient ‘original intention’ due to the modern cultural context we bring to our language’s words… our ‘education’. Studying the Word-for-Word translation of the Chinese character’s many synonym-like meanings helps mitigate this. (Click graphic at right for on-line Word-for-Word.)

Third Pass: Chapter of the Month 9/24/2015

Archive: Characters and past commentary

Corrections?

There are no corrections per se, although it feels like there should be ;-). At the end of Reflections, I include the Word-for-Word again to broaden the meaning of my particular choice of words for the translation. This time, the odd thing is the repeated use of the word fū (夫).

Fū (夫) in the high tone translates as husband; man, porter, manual worker, scholar, old fogey; conscripted laborer (old). In the rising tone, fú it translates classically as: this, that; he, she, they; (exclamatory final particle); (initial particle, introduces an opinion). In the Word for Word, I just put the common current usage, which here falls short. However, none of these other meanings makes that much difference, at least to me. It really boils down to how a reader interprets the meaning of whatever word occupies that position. The next best choice as I see it would be: this, that; he, she, they, but as you see that isn’t much different from the generic Man.

Reflections:

Realizing I don’t’ know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.

First, simply realizing this in a static way is not sufficient. It is essential to maintain an active, moment-to-moment ‘apprehension’ of this realization. Apprehension is the perfect word here. It combines a sense of fear, with an apprehending of something… like realizing I don’t know is better. Fear focuses the mind; we take what we fear seriously. Note: It will be useful to ‘apprehend’ the root meaning of fear here. See Fear & Need Born in Nothing and perhaps Fear Is The Bottom Line.

Man alone faults this disease; this so as not to be ill.
The sacred person is not ill, taking his disease as illness.
Man alone has this disease; this is because to him there is no illness.

It is my sense that, in our heart of hearts, way deep down, we know that we don’t know. The symptoms point of view is a tipoff. We put those who seem to know on a pedestal, and worry about not knowing what we ‘should’. Generally, we are quite insecure about our knowledge. The Blind men and the elephant depict our desperation to be certain. All this comes across to me as a symptom of the fact that we intuitively realize that we don’t know, but don’t realize that it is better to realize that we don’t know. Knowledge is power, and hierarchical instincts, along with fear generally, drive us to pretend that we know. The drive is so strong that it blinds us to the reality ⁽¹⁾.

So in a way line 2 and line 4 are both true. Part of us knows we have this disease. We respect and value any displays of humility that exemplify this. On the other hand, we suffer from this disease because we are generally in denial that this is a disease. We are too preoccupied with knowing to apprehend fully that we don’t and can’t know. Another symptom is our myths of sages (Jesus, Buddha, etc.); they keep our hopes alive that knowing is possible.

That leaves us with the question of the sacred person. I assume that the more a person continually apprehends this knowing, the more sacred. I suppose self-honesty is essential for such humility; self-honesty cuts down on hypocrisy. Finally, self-honesty increases with age, in my experience anyway.