Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (9 page)

The first and last verses hang together; the two middle
verses are difficult and rather incoherent.
Waley
says the enigmatic second verse refers to sophists and sages who went about
selling their "fine words" to the highest bidder, like our pop gurus
and TV pundits.

I think the advice about being careful at the end of an undertaking
was added, perhaps to balance the advice that the right time to act is before
the beginning. It confuses the argument a bit, and I put it in parentheses.

The line I give as "tum back to what people
overlooked" is rendered by
Lafargue
as
"turns back to the place all others have gone on from";
Feng
-English, "brings men back to what they have
lost";
Henricks
, "returns to what the
masses have passed by";
Waley
, "turning all
men back to the things they have left behind." Each version brings out a
different color in the line, like different lights on an opal.

A dictator and his censors might all too easily cite from
this chapter. A democrat might agree that the more people know, the harder they
are for a ruler to govern—since the more they know, the better they are at
governing themselves. Anyone might agree that an intellectual agenda pursued
without reality-checking is indeed a curse upon the land. From the divine right
of kings through the deadly teachings of Hitler and Mao to the
mumbojumbo
of economists, government by theory has done endless
ill. But why is Lao Tzu's alternative to it a people kept in ignorance? What
kind of ignorance?
Ignorance of what?
Lao Tzu may be
signalling
us to ask such questions when he speaks of
"understanding these things."

Waley
is my guide to the
interpretation of the second verse, but I make very free with the last two
lines of it. If they aren't a rather vapid statement that one should never
underestimate one's foe, they must follow from what went before and lead to the
extraordinary last verse. It all comes down to the last line and the word
shwai
.
Carus
translates it as "the weaker [the more
compassionate]," and
Bynner
uses the word
"compassion."
Waley
translates it as
"he who does not delight in war,"
Henricks
as "the one who feels grief," Gibbs-Cheng as "the one stung by
grief,"
Feng
-English as "the
underdog,"
Lafargue
as "the one in mourning."
A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

I follow
Henricks
in choosing the
Ma
wang
tui
text, which has a double negative in the second line.
Most other texts have "not knowing
knowing
is
sickness."

I take the liberty of reading this chapter as a description
of what we, we ordinary people, should fear. The usual reading is in the
manual-for-princes mode. In that case "what should be feared" is the
ruler, the rightful authority, and the advice that follows is evidently
directed to that ruler. It's certainly what 'William Blake would have told the
oligarchs of the Industrial Revolution, who still control our lives:

When people don't fear what should
be feared
they are in fearful danger.
Don't make them live in narrow houses
,
don't force them to do stupid work.

When they're not made stupid
they won't act stupidly.

I follow the
Ma
wang
tui
text, but make very
free with the word
Henricks
renders as "constant
[in their behavior]." If I understand
Henricks
'
version, it says that if people were consistent in behaving normally and in
fearing death, and if death were the penalty for abnormal behavior, nobody
would dare behave abnormally; and so there would be no executions and no
executioners. But this is not the case; as Lao Tzu says, there are times when
even normal people lose their normal fear of death. So what is the poem about?
I read it as saying that since we are inconsistent both in our behavior and in our
fear of death, no person can rightfully take on the role of executioner, and
should leave the death penalty to the judgment of heaven or nature.

To dismiss this Utopia as simply
regressivist
or anti-technological is to miss an interesting point. These people have labor-saving
machinery, ships and land vehicles, weapons of offense and defense. They
"have them and don't use them." I interpret: they aren't used by
them. We're used, our lives shaped and controlled, by our machines, cars,
planes, weaponry, bulldozers, computers. These Taoists don't surrender their
power to their creations.

The eleventh line, however, is certainly regressive if it
says knotted cords are to replace written literature, history, mathematics, and
so on. It might be read as saying
it's
best not to
externalize all our thinking and remembering (as we do in writing and reading),
but to keep it embodied, to think and remember with our bodies as well as our
verbalizing brains.

This last poem is self-reflexive, wrapping it all up tight
in the first verse, then opening out again to praise the
undestructive
,
uncompetitive generosity of the spirit that walks on the Way.

To my mind, the best reason for following the
Ma
wang
tui
text in reversing the order of the books is that
the whole thing ends with a chapter (37) that provides a nobler conclusion than
this one. But if you reverse the order, chapter I turns up in the middle of the
book, and I simply cannot believe that that's right. That poem is a beginning.
It is the beginning.