I have read the Tao Te Ching numerous times. It has shaped my thought more than any other source. When I read it, I do not try to understand it. I simply let it flow over me, allowing the words to leave whatever impression they might leave. Over time, I suppose some understanding has seeped in, at least to the extent that the book has made a significant impact on the way I think and live.
What I have done for 5-7-5 is to accompany my current reading of the Tao Te Ching with haiku that inspire me as I am reading. Because Stephen Mitchell’s translation is so poetic, sometimes lines of the haiku are direct quotes. More often, I simply paraphrase a verse. None of my haiku are an attempt to comment on or explain Lao-Tzu’s words. As always I submit myself to the discipline of 5-7-5 structure. Whose translation of the Tao is the best is a matter of debate. I don’t care whose is best. I have read several translations and always come back to and enjoy Stephen Mitchell’s rendition the most. I don’t read the Tao to feed my brain.
I will let Stephen Mitchell comment on the Tao Te Ching itself. What follows is a long quote from the forward to his newest version from Harper-Collins.
“Tao Te Ching (pronounced, more or less, Dow Deh Jing) can be translated as The Book of the Immanence of the Way or The Book of the Way and of How It manifests Itself in the Word or, simply, The Book of the Way…
“About Lao-tzu, its author, there is practically nothing to be said. He may have been an older contemporary of Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) and may have held the position of archive-keeper in one of the petty kingdoms of the time. But all the information that has come down is highly suspect. Even the meaning of his name is uncertain (the most likely interpretations: “the Old Master” or, more picturesquely, “the Old Boy”). Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces. All he left us is his book: the classic manual on the art of living, written in style of gemlike lucidity, radiant with humor and grace and large-heartedness and deep wisdom: one of the wonders of the world.
“People usually think of Lao-tzu as a hermit, a dropout from society, dwelling serenely in some mountain hut, unvisited except perhaps by the occasional traveler arriving from a 60s joke to ask, “What is the meaning of life?” But it is clear from his teachings that he deeply cared about society, if society means the welfare of one’s fellow human beings; his book is, among other things, a treatise on the art of government, whether of a country or a child. The misperception may arise from his insistence on wei wu wei, literally “doing not-doing,” which has been seen as passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance….
“Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.
“Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame. This “nothing” is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body. Hence Lao-tzu’s emphasis on softness. Softness means the opposite of rigidity, and is synonymous with suppleness, adaptability, endurance. Anyone who has seen a t’ai chi or aikido master doing not-doing will know how powerful this softness is.
“Lao-tzu’s central figure is a man or woman whose life is in perfect harmony with the way things are. This is not an idea; it is a reality; I have seen it. The Master has mastered Nature; not in the sense of conquering it, but of becoming it. In surrendering to the Tao, in giving up all concepts, judgements, and desires, her mind has grown naturally compassionate. She finds deep in her own experience the central truths of the art of living which are paradoxical only on the surface: that the more truly solitary we are, the more compassionate we can be; the more we let go of what we love, the more present our love becomes; the clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good. Until finally she is able to say, in all humility, “I am the Tao, the Truth, the Life.
“The teaching of the Tao Te Ching is moral in the deepest sense. Unencumbered by any concept of sin, the Master doesn’t see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can’t shine through. This freedom from moral categories allows him his great compassion for the wicked and the selfish.
“Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn’t reject anyone.
He is ready to use all situations
and doesn’t waste anything.
This is called embodying the light.
What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this you will get lost,
however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.”
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