For the good person, weapons are inauspicious tools – even evil.
Hence, one who has the way gets along without them.
A person of noble character dwells normally noble left,
The use of weapons normally noble right.
Weapons are inauspicious tools,
Not the tools of a person of noble character,
Having no alternative but to use them,
Indifferent to fame or gain, to lightly act is best.
Victorious yet not beautiful,
Yet of beautiful this cheerfully killing people.
Man cheerfully killing people, normally never get their way in the world.
Auspicious affairs revere left, burial affairs revere right.
The partisan general dwells on the left, the superior general dwells right.
Speaks at funeral places.
Murder of many takes sorrowful tears, defeat takes management of the mourning rites.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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?
A major one would be in order, depending on how you correlate ‘left’ and ‘right’. For now, I’ll play it safe and just make my case for a change.
YouTube Audio Recording:
Reading and Remarks : the ‘4 bell’ section of our Sunday meeting.
Open discussion : how it all relates to our personal experience.
Reflections:
For the good person, weapons are inauspicious tools – even evil.
Hence, one who has the way gets along without them.
When I have inner security and my feet on the ground, my actions in the world tend to be good and balanced. With emotional equanimity, I am able to consider softer tools to apply in managing my affairs that don’t have negative repercussions.
A person of noble character dwells normally noble left,
The use of weapons normally noble right.
Weapons are inauspicious tools,
Not the tools of a person of noble character,
It sounds like the noble left corresponds to when we have our feet on the ground, balanced, and secure. The noble right would logically correspond to the opposite. Does it? Or did the whole left / right get misinterpreted at some distant point in the past? More on this later.
Having no alternative but to use them,
Indifferent to fame or gain, to lightly act is best.
The beauty of the Tao Te Ching lies in how balanced and true to nature’s reality it is, as when it points out here that the use of weapons are not the first choice, but rather the last choice of a person of noble character. For instance, reality calls for the noble bear to protect its cubs, and will use its teeth and claws as needed. Of course, the wars humans wage are ignoble insane extremes, but these are merely a natural consequence of the tradeoff our species unwittingly made long ago. (See The Tradeoff.)
Certainly, some wars are unavoidable, as in against Hitler’s madness. Only in the eye of a blind idealist are all wars avoidable… through turning the other cheek or what not. As chapter 5 notes, The universe is not benevolent, and all things serve as grass dogs (‘sacrificial lambs’). The wise person is not benevolent, and the people serve as grass dogs. Here again we see the Tao Te Ching almost as a spokesman for Nature. Absent here is any hint of a benevolent deity favoring humanity over other creatures.
Chapter 80 does offer us a solution to war. It begins with, Reduce the size and population of the state. Then a few lines down we see, Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope. That last line sounds like a pie in the sky call to return to our hunter-gatherer ways. But, it might not be necessary to go all the way back. In the long-term this return is bound to come to pass as I described in The Tradeoff.
Victorious yet not beautiful,
Yet of beautiful this cheerfully killing people.
Man cheerfully killing people, normally never get their way in the world.
This may reveal a dreadfully balanced view… and one that we have great difficulty appreciating. It reminds me of the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna throws down his weapons and refuses to fight at first. Alas, there are the natural dynamics of nature the make war inevitable. Doing one’s duty, even if that be cheerfully killing people is a natural beauty, despite how dreadful this feels to us. While cheerfully killing people is an objectively natural wonder, so to speak, the subjective reality of individuals cheerfully reveling in mayhem normally never get their way in the world. As usual, there are two sides to this coin.
Auspicious affairs revere left, burial affairs revere right.
Auspicious affairs are positive circumstances and so correlate to the Yang side of life’s equation. Burial affairs are the reality of circumstances already played out… This is the mournful reality of reality, and perhaps aligns with Buddha’s First Noble Truth on sorrow. As such, Burial affairs correlate to the Yin side of life. By reversing left and right in this line and the next, we can repair this irregularity. Allow me to explain more…
It feels to me like someone screwed up transcribing or interpreting this somewhere down the line centuries or millennia ago. I see a core inconsistency in the way left / right play out here, as correlations makes clear (see Tools of Taoist Thought: Correlations).
Briefly, yin is yin and yang is yang, and never the twain shall meet, at least until profound sameness overtakes perception.
Yin ≅ left, negative, passive, burial affairs, soft weapons, superior general (statesman like),
Yang ≅ right, positive, active, auspicious affairs, hard weapons, partisan general (tribal),
Interestingly, some words, like love and possibly noble, can correlate to both yin and yang. All our linguistic inconsistencies allow our very intelligent mind to be exceedingly ‘flexible’ in rationalizing what it needs or fears to see. As chapter 18 notes, When intelligence increases, there exists great falseness. D.C. Lau put it a little more bluntly, When cleverness emerges, there is great hypocrisy. This is not surprising as all word meaning pivots on emotion, and emotion is naturally irrational — especially the roots of emotion, need and fear. Ah, the stories we tell ourselves to be right with life, so to speak.
The partisan general dwells on the left, the superior general dwells right.
Speaks at funeral places.
Partisans will be more reactive and aggressive by nature and so correlate to the noble right instead, i.e., The use of weapons normally noble right. The superior general is a statesman that sees beyond the narrow partisan horizon. As a good person, he correlates to the left, i.e, A person of noble character dwells normally noble left. On the other hand, you could say that this as hinting that: for the sake of greater balance, the partisan subconsciously yearns to dwell on the left, and the superior subconsciously yearns to dwell on the right. However, that seems to be a stretch.
Murder of many takes sorrowful tears, defeat takes management of the mourning rites.
Yes!
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