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everyone can realise beauty to define it such beauty soiled everyone can realise goodness to define it such goodness defiled with & without give birth to one another hard & easy complete each other success & defeat shape one another noble & lowly measure each other sound & silence complement one another first & last escort each other the wayfarer attends without intending offers guidance without prescription myriad ways arise without her doing cultivated but not possessed served without presumption accompanied without claim nothing claimed nothing lost --- LINES 1-10: The existence of beauty & goodness is not being denied here. These things do exist, but once we attempt to explain it, classify it, or pre-scribe it, we have lost sight of beauty and goodness; instead we become concerned only with our explanations, classifications & prescriptions. As a result, beauty & goodness cease to come about in a natural & spontaneous way; it becomes forced & coerced & therefore destroyed. The act of explaining, classifying & prescribing is an attempt to control the events of the world by carving up reality into this & that. It is the result of clinging to what can never be clung to. Beauty & goodness are free gifts of the universe, but once we accept these human definitions as reality itself we become alienated from the world, from ourselves & from one another. I say 'realise' as in REAL-ise-- we ALL possess beauty & goodness & we can all realise it, that is, make it existentially real in ourselves. What thwarts that growth is when we are told 'No, you're doing that wrong.' That beauty & goodness is something natural & the concrete world is far more complex & dynamic than an abstract static ideology. LINES 11-17: sheng ren = Often translated in English as the sage (literally, wise man). Ive decided to translate as wayfarer, a person simply traveling along the way, or an ideal person who mirrors the way. 'Sage,' 'wise person,' etc. sounds a bit too elitist for my taste. wu wei = Attends without intending The wayfarer models himself on dao. Like dao, the wayfarer accomplishes his work thru wu wei. Wu wei is a kind of action that is brought about by focusing attention on the thing itself rather than being motivated by the desired result. It is action performed for its own sake. It is action (attends) but without coercion or specifically goal directed (withou intending). That's my attempt at trying to 'unpack' the word anyway. About the 'nothing gained / nothing lost' bit-- I don't consider this to be a sort of stoic resignation. What is not 'lost' by the wayfarer is all the possibilities the world has to offer rather than automatically putting limits on everything beforehand. No possibilities of beauty or goodness slip thru as a result. This is one of the things I do in the electronic ambient music I record-- rather than placing limitations on what can be considered 'musical' or not, I allow myself to be open to all sorts of possibilities. By doing so, I am able to create things I otherwise would not be able to ('this is musical, this isn't musical'). If I placed specific definitions beforehand, I don't allow myself to hear the beauty within a particular sound & then I lose it. But if I'm open to all the possibilities of sound, so much more is created-- except I'm not creating it-- it's already there for the taking! | BY: Nina | Guodian Laozi | DDJ Concordance | Comparisons | From the DIO Forum | BY: Bao Pu | By: Joshua | Who was Laozi | | Return Home | Laozi's Dao De Jing | Your Dao De Jing | Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) | Links | Meditation | Dao (Tao) is Open Forum | Book List | Other Stuff | |
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