Staying put keeps you in position.
To live till you die
is to live long enough.
34 - Perfect trust
The Great Way runs
to left, to right,
the ten thousand things
depending on it,
living on it,
accepted by it.
Doing its work,
it goes unnamed.
Clothing and feeding
the ten thousand things,
it lays no claim on them
and asks nothing of them.
Call it a small matter.
The ten thousand things
return to it,
though it lays no claim on them.
Call it great.
So the wise soul
without great doings
achieves greatness.
35 - Humane power
Hold fast to the great thought
and all the world will come to you,
harmless, peaceable, serene.
Walking around, we stop
for music, for food.
But if you taste the Way
it’s flat, insipid.
It looks like nothing much,
it sounds like nothing much.
And yet you can’t get enough of it.
36 - The small dark light
What seeks to shrink
must first have grown;
what seeks weakness
surely was strong.
What seeks its ruin
must first have risen;
what seeks to take
has surely given.
This is called the small dark light:
the soft, the weak prevail
over the hard, the strong.
* * *
There is a third stanza in all the texts:
Fish should stay underwater:
the real means of rule
should be kept dark.
Or, more literally, “the State’s sharp weapons ought not to be shown to the people.” This Machiavellian truism seems such an anticlimax to the great theme stated in the first verses that I treat it as an intrusion, perhaps a commentator’s practical example of “the small dark light.”
37 - Over all
The Way never does anything,
and everything gets done.
If those in power could hold to the Way,
the ten thousand things
would look after themselves.
If even so they tried to act,
I’d quiet them with the nameless,
the natural.
In the unnamed, in the unshapen,
is not wanting.
In not wanting is stillness.
In stillness all under heaven rests.
* * *
Here the themes of not doing and not wanting, the unnamed and the unshapen, recur together in one pure legato. It is wonderful how by negatives and privatives Lao Tzu gives a sense of serene, inexhaustible fullness of being.
Book Two: Chapters 38-81
38 - Talking about power
Great power, not clinging to power,
has true power.
Lesser power, clinging to power,
lacks true power.
Great power, doing nothing,
has nothing to do.
Lesser power, doing nothing,
has an end in view.
The good the truly good do
has no end in view.
The right the very righteous do
has an end in view.
And those who act in true obedience to law
roll up their sleeves
and make the disobedient obey.
So: when we lose the Way we find power;
losing power we find goodness;
losing goodness we find righteousness;
losing righteousness we’re left with obedience.
Obedience to law is the dry husk
of loyalty and good faith.
Opinion is the barren flower of the Way,
the beginning of ignorance.
So great-minded people
abide in the kernel not the husk,
letting the one go, keeping the other.
* * *
A vast, dense argument in a minimum of words, this poem lays out the Taoist values in steeply descending order: the Way and its power; goodness (humane feeling); righteousness (morality); and—a very distant last—obedience (law and order). The word I render as “opinion” can be read as “knowing too soon”: the mind obeying orders, judging before the evidence is in, closed to fruitful perception and learning.
39 - Integrity
Those who of old got to be whole:
Heaven through its wholeness is pure;
earth through its wholeness is steady;
spirit through its wholeness is potent;
the valley through its wholeness flows with rivers;
the ten thousand things through their wholeness live;
rulers through their wholeness have authority.
Their wholeness makes them what they are.
Without what makes it pure, heaven would disintegrate;
without what steadies it, earth would crack apart;
without what makes it potent, spirit would fail;
without what fills it, the valley would run dry;
without what quickens them, the ten thousand things would die;
without what authorizes them, rulers would fall.
The root of the noble is in the common,
the high stands on what’s below.
Princes and kings call themselves
“orphans, widowers, beggars,”
to get themselves rooted in the dirt.
A multiplicity of riches
is poverty.
Jade is praised as precious,
but its strength is being stone.
40 - By no means
Return is how the Way moves.
Weakness is how the Way works.
Heaven and earth and the ten thousand things
are born of being.
Being is born of nothing.
41 – On and off
Thoughtful people hear about the Way
and try hard to follow it.
Ordinary people hear about the Way
and wander onto it and off it.
Thoughtless people hear about the Way
and make jokes about it.
It wouldn’t be the Way
if there weren’t jokes about it.
So they say:
The Way’s brightness looks like darkness;
advancing on the Way feels like retreating;
the plain Way seems hard going.
The height of power seems a valley;
the amplest power seems not enough;
the firmest power seems feeble.
Perfect whiteness looks dirty.
The pure and simple looks chaotic.
The great square has no corners.
The great vessel is never finished.
The great tone is barely heard.
The great thought can’t be thought.
The Way is hidden
in its namelessness.
But only the Way
begins, sustains, fulfills.
42 - Children of the Way
The Way bears one.
The one bears two.
The two bear three.
The three bear the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things
carry the yin on their shoulders
and hold in their arms the yang,
whose interplay of energy
makes harmony.
People despise
orphans, widowers, outcasts.
Yet that’s what kings and rulers call themselves.
Whatever you lose, you’ve won.
Whatever you win, you’ve lost.
What others teach, I say too:
violence and aggression
destroy themselves.
My teaching rests on that.
* * *
Beginning with a pocket cosmology, this chapter demonstrates the “interplay of energy” of yin and yang by showing how low and high, winning and losing, destruction and self-destruction, reverse themselves, each turning into its seeming opposite.
43 - Water and stone
What’s softest in the world
rushes and runs|
over what’s hardest in the world.
The immaterial
enters
the impenetrable.
So I know the good in not doing.
The wordless teaching,
the profit in not doing—
not many people understand it.
44 - Fame and fortune
Which is nearer,
name or self?
Which is dearer,
self or wealth?
Which gives more pain,
loss or gain?
All you grasp will be thrown away.
All you hoard will be utterly lost.
Contentment keeps disgrace away.
Restraint keeps you out of danger
so you can go on for a long, long time.
45 - Real power
What’s perfectly whole seems flawed,
but you can use it forever.
What’s perfectly full seems empty,
but you can’t use it up.
True straightness looks crooked.
Great skill looks clumsy.
Real eloquence seems to stammer.
To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving;
to be comfortable in the heat, hold still;
to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear.
46 - Wanting less
When the world’s on the Way,
they use horses to haul manure.
When the world gets off the Way,
they breed warhorses on the common.
The greatest evil: wanting more.
The worst luck: discontent.
Greed’s the curse of life.
To know enough’s enough
is enough to know.
47 - Looking far
You don’t have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don’t have to look out the window
to see the way of heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.
So the wise soul
doesn’t go, but knows;
doesn’t look, but sees;
doesn’t do, but gets it done.
* * *
We tend to expect great things from “seeing the world” and “getting experience.” A Roman poet remarked that travelers change their sky but not their soul. Other poets, untraveled and inexperienced, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, prove Lao Tzu’s point: it’s the inner eye that really sees the world.
48 - Unlearning
Studying and learning daily you grow larger.
Following the Way daily you shrink.
You get smaller and smaller.
So you arrive at not doing.
You do nothing and nothing’s not done.
To run things,
don’t fuss with them.
Nobody who fusses
is fit to run things.
* * *
The word shi in the second stanza, my “fuss,” is troublesome to the translators. Carus’s quite legitimate translation of it is “diplomacy,” which would give a stanza I like very much:
To run things,
be undiplomatic.
No diplomat
is fit to run things.
49 - Trust and power
The wise have no mind of their own,
finding it in the minds
of ordinary people.
They’re good to good people
and they’re good to bad people.
Power is goodness.
They trust people of good faith
and they trust people of bad faith.
Power is trust.
They mingle their life with the world,
they mix their mind up with the world.
Ordinary people look after them.
Wise souls are children.
* * *
The next to last line is usually read as saying that ordinary people watch and listen to wise people. But Lao Tzu has already told us that most of us wander on and off the Way and don’t know a sage from a sandpile. And surely the quiet Taoist is not a media pundit.
Similarly, the last line is taken to mean that the wise treat ordinary people like children. This is patronizing, and makes hash out of the first verse. I read it to mean that the truly wise are looked after (or looked upon) like children because they’re trusting, unprejudiced, and don’t hold themselves above or apart from ordinary life.
50 - Love of life
To look for life
is to find death.
The thirteen organs of our living
are the thirteen organs of our dying.
Why are the organs of our life
where death enters us?
Because we hold too hard to living.
So I’ve heard
if you live in the right way,
when you cross country
you needn’t fear to meet a mad bull or a tiger;
when you’re in a battle
you needn’t fear the weapons.
The bull would find nowhere to jab its horns,
the tier nowhere to stick its claws,
the sword nowhere for its point to go.
Why? Because there’s nowhere in you
for death to enter.
51 - Nature, nurture
The Way bears them;
power nurtures them;
their own being shapes them;
their own energy completes them.
And not one of the ten thousand things
fails to hold the Way sacred
or to obey its power.
Their reverence for the Way
and obedience to its power
are unforced and always natural.
For the Way gives them life;
its power nourishes them,
mothers and feeds them,
completes and matures them,
looks after them, protects them.
To have without possessing,
do without claiming,
lead without controlling:
this is mysterious power.
52 - Back to the beginning
The beginning of everything
is the mother of everything.
Truly to know the mother
is to know her children,
and truly to know the children
is to turn back to the mother.
The body comes to its ending
but there is nothing to fear.
Close the openings,
shut the doors,
and to the end of life
nothing will trouble you.
Open the openings,
be busy with business,
and to the end of life
nothing can help you.
Insight sees the insignificant.
Strength knows how to yield.
Use the way’s light, return to its insight,
and so keep from going too far.
That’s how to practice what’s forever.
* * *
This chapter on the themes of return and centering makes circles within itself and throughout the book, returning to phrases from other poems, turning them round the center. A center which is everywhere, a circle whose circumference is infinite….
53 - Insight
If my mind’s modest,
I walk the great way.
Arrogance
is all I fear.
The great way is low and plain,
but people like shortcuts over the mountains.
The palace is full of splendor
and the fields are full of weeds
and the granaries are full of nothing.
People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
isn’t the way.
* * *
So much for capitalism.
54 - Some rules
Well planted is not uprooted,
well kept is not lost.
The offerings of the generations
to the ancestors will not cease.
To follow the way yourself is real power.
To follow it in the family is abundant power.
To follow it in the community is steady power.
To follow it in the whole country is lasting power.
To follow it in the world is universal power.
So in myself I see what self is,
in my household I see what family is,
in my town I see what community is,
in my nation I see what a country is,
in the world I see what is under heaven.
How do I know the world is so?
By this.
* * *
I follow Waley’s interpretation of this chapter. It is Tao that plants and keeps; the various kinds of power belong to Tao; and finally in myself I see the Tao of self, and so on.
55 - The sign of the mysterious
Being full of power
is like being a baby.
Scorpions don’t sting,
tigers don’t attack,
eagles don’t strike.
Soft bones, weak muscles,
but a firm grasp.
Ignorant of the intercourse
of man and woman,