There was Something undefined and yet complete in itself,
Born before Heaven-and-Earth.
Silent and boundless,
Standing alone without change,
Yet pervading all without fail,
It may be regarded as the Mother of the world.
I do not know its name;
I style it ‘Tao’;
And, in the absence of a better word, call it ‘The Great’.
To be great is to go on,
To go on is to be far,
To be far is to return.
Hence, ‘Tao is great,
Heaven is great,
Earth is great,
King is great.’
Thus, the king is one of the great four of the Universe.
Man follows the ways of the Earth.
The Earth follows the ways of Heaven,
Heaven follows the ways of Tao,
Tao follows its own ways.
To the average westerner, heaven and earth pretty much cover
everything – so what is this third thing that came first? To the answer that question we need to briefly
recap just what heaven and earth mean in the worldview of the Tao Te Ching.
Earth is the place we all come to know first, and for most
of the population, is the only place they will ever know. It is the world of time and space, and of
lots of lots of things that exist in time and space. People live on earth, for a period, and we
are all one of those people. Earth is
governed by laws of causality, and the purpose of science is to elucidate these
laws.
Heaven is earth seen from the opposite perspective. The tree, when seen through earthly eyes,
exists independently of the observer – we shut our eyes but the tree still
exists. Heaven is the realisation that
the only thing that is actually real is what is being observed Now. And whatever that is is in a constant state
of flux, changing at superspeed. Things
exist for only the briefest instant before being entirely eradicated by
change. The tree is eradicated forever by the darkness of the closed
eyes.
When we look at the world from the heavenly perspective
there are no independently existing things, everything is just a brief flash
with only the barest hint of existence. The
flash of our own hand is no more real to us than the flash of the tree. Everything is equal, and unified by being
nothing other than a ‘Nowness’.
Everything is Now. Time and space
are an illusion - the time-based ‘memory’ is just another Now flash. Most significantly for us, heaven reveals to
us that we do not simply exist as individuals, as we thought, and that our
identities are also eternal and transcendent of selfhood.
So we have two perspectives on reality: the earthly
perspective of time and space, and the heavenly perspective of eternity and
infinity.
The Tao, as referred to in the first line of this verse, is ‘that’
which might be seen from either of these perspectives. It is a nameless, conceptually empty state
that we either have and know, or we don’t.
There was Something undefined and yet complete in itself,
Born before Heaven-and-Earth.
This mustn’t be taken literally, it is just a figure of
speech. But perhaps it is safer to say
that the Something transcends heaven and earth and is the place where both of
these viewpoints emerge. The Something
is a perspective that synthesises the only two perspectives that we can think
about it. It transcends time, and so
therefore does not come before time as this verse suggests.
Silent and boundless,
Standing alone without change,
Yet pervading all without fail,
It may be regarded as the Mother of the world.
The author is trying to capture the Tao in the conceptual
language of earth. Of course this can’t
be done. Strictly speaking, it is as apt
to call the Tao active and concrete as ‘silent and boundless’. The benefit of using the analogy of silence
is that it makes the Tao less likely to be associated with any one of the
noise-making things that we witness on earth.
Such an identification is called idolatry, and is always a sure sign
that the spiritual nature of the ultimate concept is being forgotten.
If we insist on explaining the Tao through the paradigm of
causality then It becomes the first cause, the Creator. Whether this creator is cast as the Mother (as
it is here) or the Father is immaterial, as either Parent is nothing more than
a metaphor for something that transcends the realm of causality.
I do not know its name;
I style it ‘Tao’;
And, in the absence of a better word, call it ‘The Great’.
We know the Tao by using other faculties than the rational
intellect. We therefore understand that
any word does not have the ability to communicate this truth. It is a sure-fire sign of ignorance of the Tao
(or God), when a person believes that words suffice. Their very attempt to argue the point is an
advertisement that their arguments cannot be trusted.
When you are acquainted with the Tao, one becomes very
forgiving to those who try to explain it.
You are left thinking: ‘of course his words don’t capture it, but the
attempt is as good as any!’
How do we know when someone knows? Again, not with our
intellects. If we feel love and peace
when we hear the words, however, that is a pretty good indication.
To be great is to go on,
To go on is to be far,
To be far is to return.
The Tao attracts labels like ‘great’ because of the way we
use ‘great’ in everyday life. The great
thing is that which seems to survive and prosper regardless of the ravages of
time and misfortune. So of course the
deathless Tao is like this. But all the
great things in this earthly life are vulnerable to change and decay. In this sense ‘great’ doesn’t even begin to
do justice to the Tao.
The great thing not only endures over time, it also spreads
far over the land. The best ideas catch
on and spread like wildfire. Likewise with
the Tao: there is nowhere that the Tao is not.
Whether you go far, live long or stay put, the Tao goes with
you, stays with you, returns to you!
Hence, ‘Tao is great,
Heaven is great,
Earth is great,
King is great.’
Thus, the king is one of the great four of the Universe.
Here the author does one of those genius flips which so
often leave us baffled, but are characteristically Taoist. All through this verse we have been learning about
the ineffability of the Tao, and the regrettable need to reduce it to terms
that we already understand.
Now we are reminded that all the great things we know are
made great precisely because of their
accordance with the Tao. Their greatness
is their Taoness!
We are taught here that we should never let ourselves think
that there is some divide between the mundane and the spiritual. The King is the personification of the
Tao. Our obedience to the King is our
obedience to the Tao. Our problem comes
when we imagine that the King is not of the Tao, that he is figure of worldly
power only and therefore not deserving of obedience.
This is a very, very difficult point to understand
intellectually. So much of the text
sounds anarchic, and many people consider the moral of the text to be about
withdrawing from the artificial laws of the world. And it is.
But the withdrawal is a spiritual withdrawal, not one that we need to
actually perform with our bodies.
There is no more loyal subject than the Taoist sage. He will insist on the observances, all the
propriety. But it is only because he is
above them that he is able to perform them with such exactitude. And he performs them because the time and
place require them, and for that reason only.
Later on that day he might well be encouraging new ceremonies, knowing
as he does, that the old have lost their influence over the people. On the surface this will look inconsistent,
but there is no inconsistency there in reality.
The true religious figure, of whatever religion is always
misunderstood by the people on this very point.
Because we are always trying to understand with our minds we get caught
in the conflict between our individual relation to the Divine, and that
required by our community. There is no
conflict, but it takes great insight to truly understand why.
Jesus advises us to "Render unto Caesar the things that
are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's". He was not with the insurgents, he saw no
need to overthrow the Roman authorities.
And yet it was on this charge that he was executed.
Man follows the ways of the Earth.
The Earth follows the ways of Heaven,
Heaven follows the ways of Tao,
Tao follows its own ways.
Yes, when it comes to the Tao the notion of leader and follower
breaks down. The Tao is what we come to when
we stop imagining all this metaphysical hierarchy and just Be!
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