The Tao is like an empty bowl,
Which in being used can never be filled up.
Fathomless, it seems to be the origin of all things.
It blunts all sharp edges,
It unties all tangles,
It harmonizes all lights,
It unites the world into one whole.
Hidden in the deeps,
Yet it seems to exist for ever.
I do not know whose child it is;
It seems to be the common ancestor of all, the father of all things.
I love this chapter! The sage has for a moment ceased all his preaching and is clearly resting in heaven a while. But he cannot stop himself from talking about it! He is just full of wonder and awe.
When we are living in each moment, and really feeling the depth and the beauty that is there to be seen, we cannot help but marvel at the creativity. Moment after moment after moment, each of them richly beautiful and meaningful, and yet each one totally and utterly unique. What is this endless stream of creation? Each instance dies in order to make way for the next. But while the things that come and go are born, endure for a while and die, the process itself is deathless and could never be exhausted.
All this grandeur is expressed in such a simple metaphor, the simple bowl which never fills up; perhaps because the spectacle of creation reminds one of a flow, perhaps of a fluids. But flowing fluids go from point to point, and when we abide on heaven and observe creation, we from our vantage see that there is never anywhere else to go.
Fathomless, it seems to be the origin of all things.
It’s tempting to imagine the void that is behind this flow of unique moments as a kind of creator, where the Tao serves a similar role as God in, say, the Christian tradition. The Tao Te Ching, however, like Buddhism, remains agnostic on the subject of first causes. The constant transformation of things, the impermanence of each situation, contradicts the notion that there can be independently existing phenomena causally interacting with each other. As the concept of Creator only makes sense in the realm of things and causality, the Tao cannot be thought of in the same way as we conventionally think of God. The Christian theologian that come closest to the Tao Te Ching is perhaps Eriugena (815-877), who by insisting that ‘God is more than existence’, could not relegate God to a mere creating being. The same must be said of the Tao, which is why our translator Wu says that it only ‘seems to be the origin of all things.’
It blunts all sharp edges,
It unties all tangles,
Whatever the Tao is, it is the certainly the reality that we live, and certain things can certainly be said about this reality. If we make a blade sharp then that same blade will become blunt. This comes as no surprise to most of us, we understand that the ravages of time will not allow anything to stay razor sharp forever. Conversely, there is never any need to be pessimistic. If there is a situation that is tangled and complex then the natural process of change will mean that old factors will pass away and new factors will come in. Very complex situations cannot abide for too long, nature will not allow them, and so the process of change is very often a process of simplification.
I think there is nothing so far that we should struggle to understand. But as usual, there is a deeper perception here which relates more accurately to the vision of the sage:
It harmonizes all lights,
It unites the world into one whole.
The sharp blade appears to our senses, in the full light of reality. But interspersed with this vision is a darker, more shadowy vision, and it is here that the blade appears blunt. We imagine that this shadowy vision is our imagination working – that we are mentally visualising what the blade will become in a future time. But the more precise view is to see how the bluntness and the sharpness present themselves as one vision. It is as if we can sense the bluntness when we see the sharpness. Bluntness and sharpness are two sides of the same coin, and to take one is to take another.
The apparently paradoxical nature of the sage’s vision is often used as a powerful teaching tool, and Zen Buddhism, which owes much to the Taoist heritage of its native China, is particularly fond of paradox. We can certainly imagine the Zen master, with twinkling eyes, saying. ‘here see how blunt my sword is, but mind you don’t cut yourself!’
Hidden in the deeps,
Yet it seems to exist for ever.
I do not know whose child it is;
It seems to be the common ancestor of all, the father of all things.
Giving the Tao a name is really a hazardous thing to do, because the moment we name something, we make it into a ‘thing’, and when a thing has a name we start to want to actually see it. The Tao can’t be seen; if it can be seen then it belongs to the realm of time, space and things and so can’t be the Tao. Our sage tells us that its hidden at the bottom of the ocean, we won’t try to look there! But never doubt that it is real. This alone is real, and if real things have a lifespan then I can only say that the Tao exists forever!
And the sage doesn’t want to talk about its provenance, or give some kind of genealogical history. If we feel fobbed off, then so we should. ‘Of the identity of the Tao’s father I can say nothing, and if fatherhood at all applies to the Tao then let’s say that that the Tao is the father of everything.’
The hardest thing for any spiritual teacher is having to answer all the questions that come solely from the assumption of time and space. Only when we drop the assumption can the question actually start to approach the Tao itself. But I think the old sage is being pretty patient with us, don’t you?
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