All under heaven realizing beauty as beauty, wickedness already.
All realizing goodness as goodness, no goodness already.
Hence existence and nothing give birth to one another,
Difficult and easy become one another,
Long and short form one another,
High and low incline to one another,
Sound and tone blend with one another,
Front and back follow one another.
Considering this, the wise person manages without doing anything,
Carries out the indescribable teaching.
Don’t all things on earth work and not shirk.
Give birth to and yet not have,
Do and yet not depend on,
Achieves success and yet not dwell.
The simple man alone does not dwell,
Because of this he never leaves.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Word for Word
Limits: Translations, even the nearly literal one above, lose some of the original meaning due to the cultural context of contemporary words. Studying the numerous synonym-like meanings of the Chinese characters in the Word-for-Word translation mitigates this. (Click graphic at right for on-line Word-for-Word.)
Third Pass: Chapter of the Month
Chinese character translation and commentary archive
Corrections?
Lines 3,6,8: I deleted the extra comma at the end of those lines. How did they get there? In the Word for Word section, I changed ride to rid… “get rid of”
Reflections:
All under heaven realizing beauty as beauty, wickedness already.
All realizing goodness as goodness, no goodness already.
I can’t help but think of nature when considering anything to do with beauty, wickedness, or goodness. For the life of me, I can’t find any of these description true of the natural world. The natural world is reality, unlike all the human machinations we deem true and real. Indeed, beauty, wickedness, and goodness simply come down to describing what “I” love or hate. Such skewed human judgments say volumes about the observer and nothing about the thing observed.
The problem with giving our emotional preferences labels like this is that it confers on them a universality that isn’t truly there. Our subjective judgment of life — what we need and fear — becomes set in cognitive concrete and voilà, we believe. The act of believing makes the fantasy feel real. This seems so obvious and yet any true believer will be blind to it. It is almost as if the judgments we make become our ‘friend’. We marry our beliefs.
To be honest, this always strikes me oddly. You would think I’d be used to this idiosyncrasy of humanity by now. I suppose my rational side is always bewildered by what it sees as irrational. Actually, this incongruity feels like it is the wellspring of humor. I mean, laughter is a good way, perhaps the only way, to…
Subdue its sharpness, untie its tangles,
Soften its brightness, be the same as dust,
Hence existence and nothing give birth to one another, and the next 5 lines present what for me is the natural and rational view. However, if taken at full value, I imagine these lines would come across to many as being irrational and even absurd. They know that good and evil are true and real in their own right. The ‘experts’ told them so.
Existence and nothing give birth to one another culminate in line 9, Considering this, the wise person manages without doing anything. Now we know what makes one wiser!
The more viscerally we feel that existence and nothing give birth to one another, the less likely we are to choose sides. In a subjective sense, it becomes difficult to say whether you are doing or not doing, for each gives rise to the other. Or perhaps more accurately, neither is actually true. They cancel out each other. Two side of a coin, yet it really is just one coin. Dialectic cognition distinguishes a difference, which is useful for manipulating nature to boost survival. However, too much of a good thing is what we are faced with now.
Having a word that connects to an experience locks you into and exaggerates the experience. The difficulty here is that it’s no longer the actual experience, but rather your thoughts about the experience. Here, all past memories along with current needs and fears now influence what you think you know. No wonder chapter 71 refers to such certainty as a disease — Realizing I don’t’ know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
These lines toward the bottom of this chapter describe for me how all life on Earth approaches the labor of living.
Don’t all things on earth work and not shirk.
Give birth to and yet not have,
Do and yet not depend on,
Achieves success and yet not dwell.
Naturally, we humans approach life this way to an extent, depending on how much cognitive baggage we drag behind us. That baggage we cherish is what maintains our illusion of self. That’s why we cherish it. As Buddha put it, “The illusion of self originates and manifests itself in a cleaving to things”. We hang on to keep our ego illusion alive and well. Thus, we have a large stake in the success we achieve, the things we do, the creations we give birth to.
The simple man alone does not dwell,
Because of this he never leaves.
Why is it that the simple man alone does not dwell? This connects back to Buddha’s Second Truth; the less one cleaves to things, the less “illusion of self” – ego – will be complicating one’s life; the simpler one will inevitably become. By holding onto nothing that much, what is there to dwell upon? By not dwelling upon anything much, he never leaves his original self for the illusion of self.
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