For managing people’s daily affairs, there is nothing like frugality.
Only the frugal man is said to serve from the start.
Serving from the start he is said to deeply accumulate virtue.
Deeply accumulating virtue, as a rule he is said to be limitless.
Being limitless, as a rule no one knows his utmost point.
No one knowing his utmost point, he can have the country.
Having the origin of the country, he can long endure.
This is called deep roots, solid foundation,
Long life, enduringly watchful of the way.
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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.
Fourth Pass: Chapter of the Month
(pandemic era)
Archive: Characters and past commentary
Zoom on YouTube Recordings:
https://youtu.be/ESZ7_zBoIOs 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
For managing people’s daily affairs, there is nothing like frugality.
Only the frugal man is said to serve from the start.
This serve from the start really caught my eye today. Timing is everything. As chapter 8 says, In action, satisfactory is time. And what is life overall but a flow of action within time. To be sure, there is a lot of bio-chemical mental activity occurring in humans, which often interrupts the flow. In the end, living life is about movement. I recently took a deep look at this. (See The Motivation Behind Doing at the end of chapter 48) Here is a short excerpt:
Happiness? When you think about it, happiness really amounts to living a meaningful life. Lacking a sense of meaning, life feels pointless and even depressing, which can make life’s habit-forming escapes even more addictive I imagine. Thus, we could rewrite the complete progression this way: fear ⇒ need ⇒ movement ⇒ happiness. This shows why ideas, pleasures, objects, success or money alone never bring happiness. They only are meaningful when they are an integral part of the flow. For example, if a fear of poverty drives your need to work hard (movement) you will feel life meaningful, and probably end up with money as well. But, it is the need driving the movement that instills meaningful happiness, not any resulting wealth.
Being frugal in action, in life, is “simply” a matter of being patient and present from the start. This occurs naturally when you are more intent on the process (movement flow) than on the future result (reward). Conversely, being wasteful of life is a result of rushing ahead to some imagined future moment in time. Without a doubt, human imagination is a very double-edged blade.
Serving from the start he is said to deeply accumulate virtue.
Deeply accumulating virtue, as a rule he is said to be limitless.
I can’t help but notice nature’s patient and present flow. Nature’s frugality serves from the start, so clearly it has deeply accumulating virtue. Unsurprisingly, I also notice how this deep-seated frugality is innate for all life on earth… in the wild at least. For civilized humans, not so much. Why?
In the wild, life is constrained by circumstances. The survival cost of being less frugal—less patient and present—is great. Interestingly, humanity has been hell bent on shielding itself from any threat to its survival and personal comfort. When you think about it, this is civilization’s whole raison d’être (see The Tradeoff). One unintended consequence here is that this allows us to be much less frugal overall.
Even further back, our species has been inventing tools and techniques over the last several hundred thousand years. We’ve pursued this path all along with the short-term intension to improve our survival and comfort. This is completely understandable! What animal, given the cognitive, social and manual ability, wouldn’t follow the same path as we have?
So, that is the why. Humanity has devised—“upgraded”—its circumstances to circumvent the natural rebalancing pushback nature provides other animals in the wild. Circumstances in the wild compel frugality by pushing back on every animals urge to get more of what is pleasurable and avoid what is painful. We have devised numerous ways to defeat that constraint on our natural urges. We want what we want, we want it now, and we devise ways to achieve that aim. Nature’s induced frugality becomes a casualty.
Being limitless, as a rule no one knows his utmost point.
No one knowing his utmost point, he can have the country.
Having the origin of the country, he can long endure.
Fear, need, and the desires that arise from those emotions define our limits. Indeed, what we want most in life turns out to be the source of our wasteful frustration, stress, and sorrow. Being limitless, as a rule no one knows his utmost point describes an ideal state wherein one has transcended fear and need, worry and desire.
That ideal certainly runs throughout most every spiritual story. The Bhagavad Gita puts it bluntly a number of time, e.g., 2:56
“He whose mind is untroubled by sorrows, and for pleasures he has no longings, beyond passion, and fear and anger, he is the sage of unwavering mind”.
This ideal can sound great on paper, and there have been many prophets promising to deliver on this ideal one way or another. Alas, as chapter 65 notes, Of ancients adept in the way, none ever use it to enlighten people, They will use it in order to fool them. This is not surprising given that most—if not all—people will only listen and take to heart a story they want to hear. Politicians and prophets alike must heed this natural fact to “succeed”.
Yet, I wonder if the Tao Te Ching isn’t being too generous. After all, any ancient adept in the way should be restrained by an insight described in chapter 56… Knowing not speak; speaking not know. On the other hand, why should we assume ancient adept in the way is referring to people? Indeed, nature and its bio-hoodwink are totally dedicated to fooling us (see How the hoodwink hooks.) There is a host of ironies to ponder here. 🙂
This is called deep roots, solid foundation,
Long life, enduringly watchful of the way.
On a practical note, long life, enduringly watchful of the way points to what we can actually do to improve our chances at the challenge presented at the beginning, i.e., For managing people’s daily affairs, there is nothing like frugality. Being watchful of the way, at a minimum, is realizing what is going on at the cellular level, so to speak. I notice two contrasting ways to approach life: (A) One strives to live up to nearly universal spiritual ideals. (B) One comprehends as deeply as possible how nature works and resolutely permits that knowing to guide action.
The first choice is actually a futile pursuit of the unnatural and impossible. Nevertheless, it offers something people throughout time have been able to hold on to, which maintains cultural cohesion and historical longevity. The much less popular second choice requires acknowledging the all-encompassing influence nature has over our existence. This threatens the ego—the illusion of self. You lose agency over your life, tossing freewill out the window. (see Free Will: Fact or Wishful Thinking? ) On the plus side, this second choice does work to a degree. How well it works depends on how watchful of the way you actually are and how gracefully you can, as chapter 3 puts it, Do without doing, follow without exception rules.
Okay, I realize that the second choice is a real stretch, so I offer this alternative: A very simple way to practice frugality is to confront your expectations. Humans, unlike other animals, can harbor numerous and greatly nuanced expectations over every facet of our lives, both present and future… and even the past if you count regret as a type of expectation. Sure, animals can feel expectant in the moment in anticipation of some gain, usually food or sex I suppose. However, they don’t create vast imagined scenarios to long for or regret after.
I find that some degree of balance is immediately possible by being ruthlessly realistic in my expectations. That really means taking responsibility for the pain I feel when my expectations (ideals) go unrealized. Even that small step is challenging for I inherently blame others for my disappointments and losses. One stipulation here is that it all depends on how much I sincerely want frugality to guide my life. In other words, I can only get what I deeply and innately want of life, and not what I expect of life. And that frugality is what I call serving from the start.
Chapter Archive https://youtu.be/pXaaF7F0rB8
This is the complete video. It begins with blowing Zen followed by the meeting
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