By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people’s hearts to remain undisturbed.
Therefore the Sage’s way of governing begins by
Emptying the heart of desires,
Filling the belly with food,
Weakening the ambitions,
Toughening the bones.
In this way he will cause the people to remain without knowledge and without desire, and prevent the knowing ones from any ado.
Practice Non-Ado, and everything will be in order.
This is one of those chapters where the Tao Te Ching reads like some kind of manual for rulers and monarchs. ‘Follow this method, and the people, your underlings, will behave well and your kingdom will be in perfect order.’ But we must not imagine that these sections do not concern us, the lowly ones. We are all responsible for each other, and if we listen to what is being said here we will find some useful moral advice.
As we saw in the first two chapters, the ideal life is lived when we learn to take each moment on its own merits. We seek nothing on the outside, therefore any given situation, any given moment lacks nothing and is entirely perfect. There are no better people or worse people, there is only this person before us right now.
The moment we start to value some behaviours more than others is the moment we become moral beings, and this is a grave departure from the ideal way of the Tao. When we have better behaviours, we have people who are better at behaving. These then become our ‘heroes’, the talented, as they are described here, and the consequence of having heroes is that we also have villains, ne’er-do-wells, losers.
Non-one wants to be the loser, people want the love and happiness that comes when our fellow humans admire us. We therefore struggle and strive to be the kind of people that others want us to be. And we don’t take kindly when others prevent us from doing so. We will argue and compete with each other in order to gain each other’s approval and love.
Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting love and admiration. What is wrong is our method of seeking it on the outside. When we learn to focus on the moment and stop our minds from always seeking things on the outside, we really start to get a good feeling. A deep feeling of peace and beauty. And the world becomes an adorable place. We become lovers of the world and of all the people and things that fill it. And you know what? When we truly accept the world and love it as it is in each moment, we find that the world loves us back of its own accord. We become a symbol of all the love and peace that people are looking for when they struggle and strive with each other. We gave them our love for free, just by accepting them, and they will give love back for free as a reward for being loved.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people’s hearts to remain undisturbed.
It is counter-productive to ‘exalt the talented’ and it is also unwise to attach more value to some of the world’s goods than others. The moment we lose the basic equality of all things on the earth is the moment we encourage people to take things that they shouldn’t. The robber is just like us, you see. What we like, he likes too: we’re all in this together! And if circumstances don’t bestow this goods upon him lawfully, he will have to acquire them unlawfully. But should we really expect him to go without them?
Therefore the Sage’s way of governing begins by
Emptying the heart of desires,
Filling the belly with food,
Weakening the ambitions,
Toughening the bones.
We are all the governors, all the monarchs of our own domains. We must therefore start with ourselves, and the peace we find will elevate every interaction we have. When we learn to appreciate the depth of pleasure contained in every moment, life will start to flow in a smoother fashion. Desire will still strike, but we shall find that the desire is temperate, appropriate to each situation, and therefore easily satisfied. The Buddhist Zen Master Bankei said: ‘My miracle is that when I am hungry I eat, and when I am tired I sleep.’ This is the miracle of the religious life: that in this simple lifestyle we gain all the pleasure we could possibly ask for. Those convinced that pleasure must be found on the outside may be hard to convince, but it shall turn out to be the truth for anyone who is willing to try the experiment.
In this way he will cause the people to remain without knowledge and without desire, and prevent the knowing ones from any ado.
Practice Non-Ado, and everything will be in order.
Non-ado is an extremely important Taoist idea often referred to in the original term wu-wei. It refers to the actions of the sage who has overcome the illusion of himself as a mortal individual in time and space, and who therefore is no longer pursuing the aims typical of a person terrified by death, suffering and misfortune.
Non-ado is what the Christians call ‘living in the palm of God’s hand’. It is the state where all sense of personal will has disappeared and it feels like life is lived according to a completely different agenda than before. Desires arise naturally and are fulfilled easily and naturally. We are provided for as if we were birds in the forest.
The life of Non-ado cannot be defined nor explained. It cannot be reduced to certain types of behaviours then others. As each moment in reality is unique, so is each response made by the sage practicing non-ado. All that can be said about it is that ‘everything will be in order’.
No comments:
Post a Comment