![]() 6 WHAT IS COMPLETEĪnd all its uses are easy. Followers of the Way, like the forces of nature, act selflessly. You can’t even be indifferent if you aren’t different. You can only be kind or cruel if you have, and cherish, a self. They are not kind they are not cruel those are human attributes. ![]() Heaven and earth - that is, “Nature” and its Way - are not humane, because they are not human. Note UKLG: The “inhumanity” of the wise soul doesn’t mean cruelty. In passages such as this one, I think it is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part. And of course the religion called Taoism is full of gods, saints, miracles, prayers, rules, methods for securing riches, power, longevity, and so forth - all the stuff that Lao Tzu says leads us away from the way. Even some of his finest scholarly translators focus on positive ethical or political values in the text, as if those were what’s important in it. The temptation is to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words. Note UKLG: Everything Lao Tzu says is elusive. The whole book is both an explanation and a demonstration of it. It’s not a statement susceptible to logical interpretation, or even to a syntactical translation into English but it’s a concept that transforms thought radically, that changes minds. ![]() Note UKLG: Over and over Lao Tzu says wei wu wei: Do not do. To let go of that belief is to find safety. To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. Note UKLG: One of the things I read in this chapter is that values and beliefs are not only culturally constructed but also part of the interplay of yin and yang, the great reversals that maintain the living balance of the world. I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you can see it rightly, it contains everything. Note UKLG: A satisfactory translation of this chapter is, I believe, perfectly impossible. ![]()
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