As for holding to fullness,
Far better were it to stop in time!
Keep on beating and sharpening a sword,
And the edge cannot be preserved for long.
Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can longer be guarded.
Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.
Here is the way of Heaven:
When you have done your work, retire!
Our biggest curse in this life is the belief that we have our own individual wills that are partitioned off from the whole. We think that if fullness is what we decide we want, then we can have it for as long as we want, so long as we are willing to work for it.
Of course we see that in nature nothing remains in its prime for long. The tree in June, with full foliage and flowering too, will, we know, turn brown and withered in November. But we fail to make the same connection to ourselves. The tree, we think is passive to the laws of nature, whereas as we have our own wills and can choose our circumstances.
The funny thing is: the sage doesn’t entirely disagree. We can intelligently shape our lives, but only if we first have the courage to face the realities of the situation.
If you allow yourselves to fully ripen, then nature will wither you. Although you don’t know it, when you are fully ripe a switch is flipped. Nature ticks a ‘job done’ box, then pays you no further notice. This is a fact and a promise. We must have the humility to know that this will happen to us. The trick, therefore, is to never reach the point where the switch is flipped. This is what the text calls ‘stopping in time’. It is deliberately depriving ourselves for the sake of further endurance. And as we have seen, when we have learnt to enjoy the blessedness of each moment – the deep joy that lies within us – we have the freedom to not always want more and more. We are not blindly compelled into flipping the switch of decay.
Keep on beating and sharpening a sword,
And the edge cannot be preserved for long.
This advice is not merely a comment on the ravishes of time, there is a deeper spiritual lesson. If we fall into the perennial delusion that we are actually the doer of our deeds, then we shall imagine that we had a blunt blade, which needed sharpening, and we were the ones who had to sharpen it. This attitude immediately sets up a conflict between yourself, and the forces of nature that make blades blunt despite all your best efforts. To imagine ourselves as the doer automatically allows the possibility for frustrated effort, and this makes us feel bad about our lives.
But if we are spiritually detached from our sharpening, we will also be immune to the frustration of the bluntening. Or to but it another way, we attach no more sense of purpose to the active act of sharpening than we do to the passive process of bluntening. Both are fine with us, and this is spiritual security.
Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can longer be guarded.
There comes a point where you have to pay your security guard as much as the jewels are worth. If you don’t, there is always a danger that the guard do the rational thing: forfeit his salary, and steal your jewels instead!
The rich person must always depend on the integrity of others if his wealth is to be maintained. And whether he is conscious of it or not, his dependency on others’ decency makes him feel insecure, anxious. For as we saw in Chapter 3, all people desire the same goods as we do, so very often the rich person is no more entitled to them, and very few people are saints.
The spiritual lesson here is something that few of us really believe. That there exists a true treasure, the so-called ‘pearl of great price’, which we find on the inside and of which all outer jewels are nothing more than a kind of symbol. As Jesus says in Matthew (6:19) ‘Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on this earth, where moths and rust destroy.’ And thieves too, our sage of the Tao Te Ching would say. But if we cannot find the true treasure of life, then gold and jade are a permissible second best – so long as we accept the anxiety they bring to us.
Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.
Riches and honours really confuse us. The truth is, and we mustn’t deny this, they do bring us pleasure. And the pleasure they bring is true, authentic and of the exact same nature as any spiritual pleasure. We know in our deepest hearts that the feeling they provide is the right feeling to aim for. And it is for these reasons that we pursue them so single-mindedly.
Our problem is, we don’t realise that the exact same feeling can be gained in much better ways. And when we follow these superior spiritual techniques we soon learn that the pleasure goes much deeper, is longer lasting and has a contagious effect on those around us.
Anyone who thinks that the spiritual life involves the rejection of their familiar hedonism does not understand the spiritual life. But the higher life does involve a trade-in of the old for the new, and to agree to such an exchange certainly requires wisdom and courage. If we don’t have these then we would rather fall back on the tried and tested methods: letters after our name, shiny stones and metals, and so on.
It is when we become maniacally fixated on these lesser pleasures that we start to trample on those around us, which is when calamity ensues.
Here is the way of Heaven:
When you have done your work, retire!
And this brings us back to the first couplet: ‘know how to stop in time’. In reality we need a substitute before we can stop in time. This is of course good advice, but unless we have found some basic spiritual contentment to compensate, then we will continue to the bitter end as if by compulsion.
There is a strange paradox in the nature of the ruthlessly ambitious. Their determination is actually an index to a very strong spiritual aspiration. No-one understands the value of peace and contentment more than they do; they are certainly ‘rich in spirit’. But they are foolish, and are the ones who have never learnt to find true pleasure. And it is their success, and the pleasure they find there, that hides the True Good ever from their eyes. As we have already discussed, the sage can see how fortune is also misfortune.
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