When all the world recognises beauty as beauty, this in itself is ugliness.
When all the world recognises good as good, this in itself is evil.
Indeed, the hidden and the manifest give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short exhibit each other.
High and low set measure to each other.
Voice and sound harmonize each other.
Back and front follow each other.
Therefore, the Sage manages his affairs without ado,
And spreads his teaching without talking.
He denies nothing to the teeming things.
He rears them, but lays no claim to them.
He does his work, but sets no store by it.
He accomplishes his task, but does not dwell upon it.
And yet it is just because he does not dwell on it
That nobody can ever take it away from him.
In the last chapter we were told about a view of reality quite apart from the realm of time and space and things. It is a realm of unity: nameless and formless, and in the Tao Te Ching this realm goes by the name of ‘heaven’. Here, at the start of the second chapter, we return to the more conventional view of things – the realm where the ordinary, everyday person lives and moves and has their being.
A notion like beauty, if it is to have any meaning, cannot apply to everything. If everything was beautiful, nothing in particular would bring itself to our attention. The term beauty would therefore describe nothing. So when we think of beauty, we imagine that it applies to some of the things in our world, and not to others. The beautiful is the name we give to that which we seek out, that which is desirable. We seek out certain things because they have particular traits that are appealing to us.
And what about things that don’t have these particular desirable traits? Well, naturally, we avoid them. We don’t want them, and just as the beautiful gives us pleasure in the realm of time and space, the ugly shall cause us displeasure. By seeking out beauty, therefore, we create in our world ugliness.
We are really in a pitiful situation, because while we accept the above analysis, we continue to imagine that all we have do is to diligently surround ourselves with the beautiful and banish what is ugly. Ugliness will still exist in the world, we say to ourselves, but it will have no further place in my world.
There are two reason why we remain frustrated in this endeavour, the first physical and the second psychological. In the world of time and space, everything is in a constant state of change. Whatever we now consider to be beautiful is therefore vulnerable to decay and destruction. All the beautiful things we surround ourselves have a tendency to turn ugly before our eyes.
The second reason is more subtle. If we continue to believe that beauty is a state the inheres in some aspects of the world and not others, we will always have a powerful sense of ugliness to go with it. Ugliness follows beauty like a shadow, we cannot run away from it. It will therefore continue to find a place in our world exactly as long as we persist in believing in beauty. Out house and garden might be filled with the most elegant and sumptuous whatnots, our person and our family renowned throughout the town for gorgeousness. But if we, psychologically, still accept and recognise the notion of beauty then something in our experience must be found to oppose that beauty. Only when we renounce beauty in the world of time and space we will overcome the pain of ugliness.
When all the world recognises good as good, this in itself is evil.
To speak so disparagingly about the search for the beautiful is one thing, but now the sage of our text suggests that our search for moral goodness will end the same way. This is a serious allegation, and strikes radically at the heart of conventional thinking in any time of history, not least today.
The attempt to be good in the world, we are told, is in itself the evil. If we identify some things as good for us, then there is automatically going to be some aspect of our existence that we disparage. This is a very hard statement to sympathise with. Surely there really are things that are good and things that are bad? If I dive into the pool to save a child from drowning, surely that is better than leading the child to the water’s edge, in order to hold their head under and drown them?
Still the sage would censure you for presuming to value life over death. It is because we are trapped into our one-sided world of time and space, of birth and death, that we are so preoccupied with our individual survival. When reality is seen in its fullness, we would not harbour such notions. Good and evil do not touch the person in possession of secure spiritual vision. The sage simply acts as the situation requires.
Indeed, the hidden and the manifest give birth to each other.
Now the basic assumptions of our existence are given the same treatment. If we assume that we are individuals in a world that exists independently of us, then our consciousness is going to be assumed to be a private personal event. We cannot share a cosmic consciousness and be separate individuals. Reality is therefore split between our subjective mental world and an objective world that we perceive and share with other people.
But let us just remember that in this chapter the sage is offering a devastating critique of the conventional worldview. He knows that all perceptions, all thoughts are of the exact same nature. Fleeting, transient flashes before a mysterious Eye that transcends it all. To the sage the hidden subjective realm and the manifest objective world are one and the same, and in his words, ‘give birth to each other’.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short exhibit each other.
High and low set measure to each other.
Voice and sound harmonize each other.
Back and front follow each other.
Too often in life we fall into the error of thinking that traits are intrinsic to the objects, when they are more sensibly viewed as being judgements highly dependent on the situation. So often we see this easily, and I think few would struggle with the five examples above. For example, if I sit opposite my wife sharing a mug of coffee and I’m lifting the mug with my right hand and she is lifting the same mug with her left hand, I would not expect to get into an argument over whether the mug is intrinsically ‘right handed’. But we do find ourselves arguing over whether the coffee is high quality or low, and if the music in the coffee shop is too loud or too soft, or if there is enough time to order a panini or not…
The truth is, we believe too much in the truth. We worry that we are going to get things wrong, that there’s going to be a terrible mistake. Deep down we all worry that we are going to suffer and die before we are ready. All arguments, deep down, are based on the fact that we are not comfortable with reality. We do not trust ourselves to cope with some of the outcomes we imagine are going to happen. This is why we need the second perspective that shows us that we are going to be fine whatever, whenever.
Therefore, the Sage manages his affairs without ado,
And spreads his teaching without talking.
He denies nothing to the teeming things.
He rears them, but lays no claim to them.
He does his work, but sets no store by it.
He accomplishes his task, but does not dwell upon it.
And here the sage reminds us of our potential. This is how to live life! When our heads aren’t full of erroneous notions about the world we live in, we are free to take whatever comes our way. We have no reason to desire anything; we have no reason to fear anything. Whatever happens is fine by us, life is finally left to flow without our intellects distorting the direction.
How does anything work when we have relinquishes all our intellectual control? With beauty, we find, and with goodness and skill and with deep enjoyment. All the things that we were searching for ourselves, but foolishly imagined needed to be found in ‘things’ outside of us!
When we meet people like the sage, (and actually we all demonstrate the skill of the sage in certain discrete domains of our life) we cannot help but love and admire what we see. This is why the sage ‘spreads his teaching without talking’. He knows that words will only confuse people, and there is no need for them anything because his teaching is made visible before our eyes.
And as for the sage? Well he is free from desire, free from anxiety. Reality has brought him work to do, but he isn’t attached to it and sees no particular merit in it. He does what he has to do, and when it’s done he will move on to the next thing. Whatever the next thing is, his heart is already and forever at the deepest peace. He has found within what we are all looking for without.
And yet it is just because he does not dwell on it
That nobody can ever take it away from him.
This is the meaning of spiritual security!
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