Tao Te Ching

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Real Power: Business Lessons from the Tao Te Ching (with James A. Autry), Riverhead Books, 1998, ISBN 1-57322-089-2 Thus, we consider worthless things, abased things, as meaningless. We say we live life to the fullest when we have what we want, and when we lose it all, we have no meaning, no purpose, no life. The book attempts to explain this. Balance. The Yin-Yang. The point of the argument concludes with something underlying the whole of existence. One constant, the Tao. I like to think of this, in my personal paradigm of faith, as God. The book says Tao came before the existence of God, which I believe refers to man’s interpretation or attempt to understand God. The Tao exists as the fundamental, underlying essence of the universe. Above the Tao, we have the evidence of “life,” the events, the good, the bad, acceptance, rejection, bliss, pain, heaven, hell, male, female – you get it. Under all these events we also have a soul, eternal and unchanging in nature.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Goodreads Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Goodreads

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, Random House, 1983, ISBN 0-679-73245-4 What cannot be denied is that the Tao Te Ching – whoever its author(s), whatever the circumstances of its composition – provides the basis for one of the world’s great philosophical and religious traditions. In its 81 short, poetic chapters, the Tao Te Ching invites the reader to approach life in a spirit of acceptance and humility. That emphasis is no accident, as the book was compiled sometime during the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.) – a singularly turbulent and unstable time from Chinese history, when both ordinary citizens and powerful leaders were only too aware of the uncertainty of human affairs. It is understandable, then, that so many passages from the Tao Te Ching emphasize contentment, caution, endurance: “Know contentment/And you will suffer no disgrace;/Know when to stop/And you will meet with no danger./You can then endure” (p. 51).The process of becoming a sage is thus a process of coming to be aware of how the Dao unfolds. To know the essence of the Dao is to know that it is empty, that it is nothing. To understand this is to be 'authentic'. I struggled with Lynn's translation of "zhen" as 'authentic' because of the connotations carried by that English term, especially as we use it in terms of 'being authentic to the self'. Lafargue translates "Zhen" as 'genuineness' which, for me, carries the same meaning but without the same connotations. "Zhen" is used to refer to the relation to the emptiness of the Dao. One thus becomes 'authentic', not by aligning one's life with the self, but by developing an ever-changing, ever-becoming self that moves with the Dao and thus acts with the Dao. The sage-king is one who rules with the Dao by taking action only within the emptiness of the Dao. In other words, the sage-king goes with the flow.

Tao Te Ching, English by Stephen Mitchell, Terebess Asia

In the practice of butchery, he had learned how to step aside and let his body do the thinking. He followed the Tao into a world of unadulterated sensation, an Eden of the don’t-know mind. The vast universe, with its myriad chiliocosms within chiliocosms, became a single knife-blade gliding through empty space. What did it matter that his material was slaughtered oxen rather than sounds or colors or words? Nothing remained but the pure joy of the work.Stephen Mitchell was born to a Jewish family, educated at Amherst College, [2] the University of Paris, [2] and Yale University, [2] and "de-educated" through intensive Zen practice. [3] He studied for four and a half years with Zen master Seungsahn and for two and a half years with Robert Baker Aitken, Rōshi. Thus the Tao cannot be expressed, it has no name, it is indivisible, inaudible and immutable but also the origin of multiplicity that gives way to ambivalent interpretation, which in turn engenders the befuddling suspicion that the more one wants to unravel the Tao the less one masters it because its aim relays precisely in attaining unforced wisdom. I thoroughly enjoyed this rendition of the Tao Te Ching and am pleased I started my Ursula K. Le Guin journey here. She reveals in the ‘Sources’ section that the title for her 1971 Science Fiction novel, ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ came from an incorrect translation of a passage from the Chuang Tzu(Another essential Taoist text) by James Legge. Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese Science and Technology would later explain to her that when the Chuang Tzu was written, the lathe hadn’t been invented. I’m very curious to read ‘The Lathe of Heaven’ to see how much of an influence Le Guin’s lifelong study of Taoism had on the work.