the wheel won't work without the hole.
A vessel is molded form solid clay;
its inner emptiness makes it useful.
To make a room, you have to cut doors and windows;
without openings, a place isn't livable.
To make use of what is here,
you must make use of what is not.
I first read the Tao in 2008, after which I wrote what is easily the most embarrassing review on this entire blog. Lines like "[t]he lifestyle the Tao seems to suggest is one of letting the world pass you by, refusing to be either happy or sad about anything that happens because it's all transitory and pointless" abound; clearly what the world needed was a review of one of its oldest religious texts by a 24-year-old religious tourist who needed something short to read.
Now, at 38(!) and hopefully wiser, I was planning to delete the review when Chris recommended I reread and re-review the Tao. I'd been planning to read it again for some time, so I did, and what a different a decade makes. In the intervening 12 years, I've completely reworked my own faith and become an amateur but ardent reader of philosophical and theological texts. The Tao this felt wise, relevant, sometimes mystifying, but never passive or pointless. The interplay of the various verses(?) in the Tao is essential and instructive, and most of the issues I had on a first reading would've been resolved if I'd approached the text carefully and thoughtfully.
Taken as a whole, the Tao presents a view of the world, and a way of being in it, that seems immensely practical, if sometimes difficult. It emphasizes engagement and radical resistance not by being alienated but by being detached and refusing to absolutize the systems and labels we create to justify our lives. In 2008, I objected to this:
Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.
But reading the text again, it's hard to understand why I couldn't see the clear couplings with verses like this, which could've been written in 1982, 1996, or 2016:
When people lose sight of the Tao,
codes of morality and justice are created.
When cleverness and strategies are in use,
hypocrites are everywhere.
When families forego natural harmony,
parents becomes pious and children become dutiful.
When the nation is reigned by darkness,
patriotic advisors abound.
There's still plenty I don't understand; the Tao has inspired meditation and exegesis for centuries. But I was heartened to be able to see the wisdom, even if my context obscures my view. In Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal describes a vision of Jesus and Lao Tzu appearing before him. Jesus is the young rabble-rouser, bursting with revolution and dreams; Tzu, ancient, has had those illusions stripped away and emanates an essential solidity, an awareness of the world as it is, not as a dream of what could be. Tzu's detachment isn't read as passivity but rather a radical acceptance that rejects physical and metaphysical violence in interest of self-divestment, to ends greater than one's own self or causes. As such, he finds peace in chaos:
The sage is as chaotic a muddy torrent.
Why "chaotic as a muddy torrent?"
Because clarity is learned by being
patient in the presence of chaos.
Tolorating disarray, remaining at rest,
gradually one learns to allows the muddy water
to settle and proper responses to reveal themselves.
Makes sense to me.
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