Chapter Twenty Three

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Chapter 23

To talk little is natural.
High winds do not last all morning.
Heavy rain does not last all day.
Why is this?
Heaven and earth!
If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal, how is it possible for man?
He who follows the Tao is at one with the Tao.
He who is virtuous experiences Virtue.
He who loses the way feels lost.
When you are at one with the Tao, the Tao welcomes you.
When you are one with Virtue, the Virtue is always there.
When you are at one with loss, the loss is experienced willingly.
He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tsu

Heavy rain does not last all day.

boy, ol' Lao Tsu never lived in Oregon!

TWENTY-THREE

When you are one with loss,
The loss is experienced willingly.
These lines and what is conjoined with them are perhaps the most puzzling in the whole of the Tao Te Ching, sos much so that Richard Wilhelm writes, " On the whole, it is probably sensible to give up the passage as hopelessly beyond interpretation."4 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the puzzle has to do with the word loss. What sort of loss is being spoken of? The present translations says, He who loses the way/is lost." It does not say, "He who loses the Tao is lost." A great deal hinges on this issue. If it is ordinary loss that is being spoken of (including loss of riches, loss of health, loss os reputation, and so on)' then we are being told that the follower of the Tao holds to the Tao in the face of all life circumstances. By contrast, if the loss of the Tao is involved, then the matter is much more troubling and interesting. It could mean (as sone translators have it) that he who loses the Tao is inwardly so lost that he feels no sense of breaking the contact with the most important thing in life. A more subtle reading could be that he who loses what he thinks is the Tao (which is therefore not the Tao that is beyond concepts) voluntarily accepts the sense of loss and is thereby brought back to a deeper movement of return. Yet another reading of this passage, one which I happen to favor and which was offered by the earliest Chinese commentator, Wang Pi, is:

And he who is identified with the abandonment [of Tao] - the abandonment [ofTao] is also happy to abandonment him.5

In other words, one receives from reality exactly what one seeks from it, "As you sow, so you reap" (Galatians 6:7) The Tao, as the whole of nature, does not voluntarily impose its will. This interpretation has the virtue of corresponding to the opening lines of the chapter.

4 Richard Wilhelm, Tao Te Ching (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 126.

5Ariane Rump with Wing-Tsit Chan, Commentary on the Lao Tzu by Wang Pi (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), 71.

-from Notes by Jacob Needleman

High winds dont last all morning? Obviously never got as far as the east coast of the UK in winter either.

Ever noticed that a lot of philosphy relies on not having a clue about things? Do trees falling in forests make noise? of course they bloody do? Anyone who watches the Simpsons knows the sound of one hand clapping.. its a feeble flappy noise, but its there.

haha QFT

or india for that matter

I was quite into the Celtic Seasonal Round, keeping the quarterly festivals of Samhain on 31 October, Imbolc, around 31 January, Beltain, celebrated around 1 May, and Lughnasadh which falls around 31 July.
I found myself in Hawaii for three years and realized the 18 month year of rainy and dry seasons was not conductive to keeping the seasonal round, letting me understand how a religion built up in the northern temperate climes had little in common with the equatorial seasons.

however, the "When you are one with loss, The loss is experienced willingly," Is the same as another philosopher, Bob Dylan, who opined "When you got nothin' you got nothing to lose, you're invisible, you got no secrets to conceal."


Like a Rolling Merle,

INteresting thought. Would Tao have been a very different philosophy if it werent founded in Chinese weather? Makes me wonder what else the weather affects. I dont think there would have been a British Empire if this island wasnt so grim and wet all the bloody time. Would the greek thinkers have been so busy thinking if they had a cold draft up their robes all day?