Cut off the sage, discard wisdom,
And the people benefit hundred fold.
Cut off benevolence, throw away justice,
And the people resume mourning kindness.
Cut off cleverness, discard advantage,
And robbers will not exist.
These three, considering culture, are not enough.
For this reason, make something to belong to;
See simply, embrace the plain, and have few personal desires.
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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
Archive: Characters and past commentary
Corrections?
None this time
Reflections:
Cut off the sage, discard wisdom,
And the people benefit hundred fold.
Cut off benevolence, throw away justice,
And the people resume mourning kindness.
Cut off cleverness, discard advantage,
And robbers will not exist.
From a Symptoms Point Of View, I feel that the first two “cut offs” say something deeper: (1) The people, having lost much of their ancestral egalitarian sense of benefit, compel them to look to the sage and wisdom as externals that will benefit them. (2) The people, having lost much of their ability to feel a deeper sense of egalitarian mourning kindness, cause them to look to benevolence and justice to fill that void.
The third “cut off” sounds fine as it is. The hierarchical system sets up ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ that naturally leave some people feeling left out of the ‘haves’ group and rob and steal their way to ‘have’. The hierarchical systems also leave people less connected in general, and so feel that their thievery is not much different than a fisherman catching fish — the stuff is there for the taking. They don’t feel they are robbing their kith and kin. In other words, folks of our ‘own-kind’ feel closest; they are extensions of ourselves. We ‘robbers’ don’t steal from ourselves; we steal from not-of-our-own-kind others, so to speak.
These three, considering culture, are not enough.
This line confirms the symptoms nature of the preceding ‘cut off’ lines. Considering culture (civilization) realistically means that merely removing symptoms does not remedy the causal hierarchical dynamics of civilization that causes the situation in the first place.
Accordingly, we see the root cause of the problem, the loss we experience, and now the impossibility to change the external circumstance enough to return us to anything approaching that idealistic ‘Garden of Eden’, so to speak. The only true lasting remedy lies within.
For this reason, make something to belong to;
This line parallels dharma in general and Buddha’s 4th Noble Truth in particular — especially, “There is salvation for him whose self disappears before truth, whose will is bent on what he ought to do, whose sole desire is the performance of his duty. He who is wise will enter this path and make an end to suffering”. The closer one gets to pulling that off, the more naturally the last line ensues…
See simply, embrace the plain, and have few personal desires.
The problem with these remedies comes down to our powerlessness over how we feel. This may not be readily apparent if you still believe in free will — that one can simply chose to live differently. Seeing simply, embracing the plain and especially having few personal desires sounds great in theory — but what about in practice. Even if you believe in free will, you will probably admit to the difficulty of putting this and the ‘make something to belong to’ into practice.
I find in the end, it comes down to how important — see simply, embrace the plain, and have few personal desires — feels to you. As Christ said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. I’ve found in life that I always get what I truly and deeply want for my life, especially when it comes to deepest matters of personal character. Ultimately, the strongest need we feel drives us off in its direction. Again, you really do get out of life what you truly want.
Finally, simply knowing what is going on, how circumstances come to be the way they are, helps me remain sober and deep enough to remain more mindful of what I truly and deeply want out of life. When you see the ‘big picture’, seeing simply comes much more readily. For a glimpse of a bigger picture, see The Tradeoff, which sums it up well I hope.
I find it best to avoid drawing too fine a distinction. Of course, discourse impels us to draw distinctions. Caught between the rock and the hard place, no? I think of free will as more an artifact of our cognitive ability. We can imagine having a ‘choice’, and we can imagine being ‘free’. It isn’t surprising that we put 1+1 together, and come up with a very rational 2.
We imagine we can “have”, just like we can imagine we can be in harmony, have Buddha nature, wu wei, and so on. Such word games takes us round and round. Examining life more scientifically helps avoid that a bit. Buddha’s 4 Truths lay it out more from that angle, avoiding notions of “Buddha nature”.
On Wéi wú: The Tao Te Ching only mentions this twice, and more accurately as wéi wú wéi, or “Do without doing”. In the last line of chapter 3: “Doing without doing, following without exception rules”, and the first line of chapter 63. “Do without doing, Be involved without being involved.”
The stronger one’s illusion of self, the easier it becomes to imagine self doing. The stronger one’s illusion of self, the harder it is to “do without doing”. The real problem with this may lie more in the projection where we feel certain other people are freely choosing their actions.
为无为 = wéi wú wéi = do; act; act as; serve as + nil; without + do; act; act as; serve as.
The concept of free will is based on the premise of separatedness from the all that is. “I can get what I truly and deeply want.”
This assumes that one can “have” something that one doesn’t already have, or that one doesn’t already “have” what one truly and deeply wants. This may be so if what one wants is in harmony with the all that is. But then, is that really “free will,” or is it “going with the flow,” wu wei, arising of itself.
Desire is the expression of disharmony with the Tao, Buddha nature, wu wei. Therefore, one might say, “I already have what I deeply and truly want, though I may not yet know it.”