In birth we join death.
Of life, follow three in ten.
Of death, follow three in ten.
Of people, aroused by life, in death trapped, also three in ten.
Why is this so?
Because they favor life.
It’s well known, those good at conserving life,
Traveling on land never meet fierce tigers,
Joining the army never the first to fight.
Of the ferocious, no place to thrust its horns.
Of the tiger, no place to apply its claw.
Of the weapon, no place to allow the knife edge.
Why is this so?
Because he is not in death trapped.
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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
(pandemic era)
Archive: Characters and past commentary
Zoom on YouTube Recordings:
https://youtu.be/58W50zhD0Ns is the link to the Zoom video of this month’s Sunday meeting. The shorter first part of the meeting begins with a chapter reading followed by attendees’ commentary, if any. A little later on begins the longer open discussion part of the meeting when those who wish to discuss how the chapter relates to their personal experience.
Corrections?
None this time
Reflections
In birth we join death.
Of life, follow three in ten.
Of death, follow three in ten.
Of people, aroused by life, in death trapped, also three in ten.
Why is this so?
Because they favor life.
These three in ten descriptions parallel the Bhagavad Gita. For example,
14:5 ― Sattva, Rajas, Tamas ‑ light, fire, and darkness ‑ are the three constituents of nature. They appear to limit in finite bodies the liberty of their infinite Spirit.
14:9 ― Sattva binds to happiness; Rajas to action; Tamas, over clouding wisdom, binds to lack of vigilance.
14:17 ― From Sattva arises wisdom, from Rajas greed, from Tamas negligence. delusion and ignorance.
Because they favor life brings Buddha’s 2nd Noble Truth immediately to my mind: “The surrounding world affects sensation and begets a craving thirst that clamors for immediate satisfaction. The illusion of self originates and manifests itself in a cleaving to things. The desire to live for the enjoyment of self entangles us in the net of sorrows. Pleasures are the bait and the result is pain.”
No wonder Buddhist and Taoist thought easily produced their offspring Zen when they encountered each other in China. While Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are a little more practical, they share the same spiritual bottom line.
Simply put, what ever we value in life produces the source of the pain we will experience in life. I call that natural justice. And frankly, no one escapes this natural law. Need and fear are the instincts driving what we value in life—what we favor or fear. Need and fear (a.k.a., pleasure and pain, attraction and aversion) are the forces that guide living things on their life’s journey. Without those innate dynamic qualities, life would be impossible.
Thus, any idea of not favoring life is an unreachable ideal. The fact that some people favor life much more than others is a characteristic of nature’s bell curve. (See Nature’s Bell Curve near the beginning of https://www.centertao.org/postscript and also, Are you out of touch with nature?) We are each born with a spectrum of innate qualities that remain with us until death—our original self. The only way I’ve found to manage the ‘problem’ of favoring life is by embracing such favoring of life as the price of life itself. After all, this is what every animal on earth feels intuitively (i.e., not consciously or deliberately).
Of course, our problem is a clever mind that imagines ways to change, control, or escape who we are and become otherwise. This battle between our original self and our ideal, imagined, ‘better self’ is the root of our unique form of suffering. The first line of Buddha’s 2nd truth suggest this, “The surrounding world affects sensation and begets a craving thirst that clamors for immediate satisfaction”. For humans, the surrounding world is both the outer world that exists and the inner world we imagine possible to exist.
Chapter 71, offers us the only way I’ve found to mitigate this difficulty, this disease… Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease. While this may sound simple enough, it’s practice is daunting. Emotion drives much (or all) of our faith in what we believe. As they say, knowledge is power, and the catch here is, who wants to give up their power? Only when emotion is quiescent can I truly “realize I don’t know”. As soon as emotion stirs, its commotion drowns out that realization. It is quite a dilemma really.
However, returning to this realization over time enables it sink into our deeper intuitive sense of life. The simple practice of acknowledging and remembering this disease, and how to mitigate it, can gradually take up more of your consciousness, even in times of stirring emotion. Constant practice—redundancy—is crucial here. This all boils down to Buddha’s first two truths, Right Comprehension and Right Resolution.
I find, the deeper my comprehension, the more unwavering my resolution becomes. Knowing the biological basis for how an animal acquires its sense of life helps the comprehension side of this. Briefly, our sense of life develops deep in the brain in a process called temporal difference learning, which uses the dopamine mediated collection of life data over time to achieve an improving sense of current and future circumstances. (See A final word on free will near the end of https://www.centertao.org/postscript/)
It’s well known, those good at conserving life,
Traveling on land never meet fierce tigers,
Joining the army never the first to fight.
Of the ferocious, no place to thrust its horns.
Of the tiger, no place to apply its claw.
Of the weapon, no place to allow the knife edge.
Why is this so?
Because he is not in death trapped.
At first glance, this may seem to imply that if one is truly good at conserving life, a tiger will actually be physically unable to apply its claw. This reminds me of the Biblical story of Daniel in the lions’ den. The mythical majestic powers of righteousness are very appealing, to be sure.
The last line offers a much more realistic interpretation of this ‘invincibility’. In whatever ways one favors life, one is naturally in death trapped in those ways. Think of death here as also pertaining to loss and failure. The more you need success, favor success, the more the fear of failure will haunt your every moment.
Those good at conserving life, comes down to making the most of one’s moment, regardless of the particulars of that moment. Thus, this applies to both the actual possibility of meeting fierce tigers, and the metaphorical description of a current situation that feels like meeting fierce tigers. Much of the stresses in life come from reacting to relatively mundane circumstances as if one is meeting fierce tigers. In other words, we make metaphoric mountains out of our reality molehills. It is precisely here that realizing you don’t know can help turn those imagined mountains back into reality molehills.
Of course, that “dopamine mediated collection of life data over time” has been telling us that we know what we know. Alas, there is no easy way of getting around the bio-hoodwink (see How the Hoodwink Hooks and Peeking in on Nature’s Hoodwink). Ignorance doesn’t know it is ignorant.
Chapter Archive https://youtu.be/MCqeGoVnq38
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