My wife tells me of a T-Shirt that
she liked when she was younger but confused her for many
years. The shirt simply stated "Change Your Mind." The ambiguities of
language sometimes hide the greatest of truths. The
solution to most of life's problems really are contained in that simple phrase
on a T-Shirt, but the mind, drowning amid the shipwreck of
itself, often misses the log floating past that will carry it to safety.
Astonishingly, Laotse's most
important statements are the first lines of the Tao Te Ching. Most
authors develop a thesis slowly and reasonably, allowing the reader
to nod approvingly, flattered in the complicity of sophistication,
at the cogency and elegance of the argument. Not so with
Laotse, who in the Sixth Century before Christ placed a satchel charge
in the slow carriage of intellectual thought that even now
has not quite detonated, although the timer is close to zero.
We might argue that the first lines
of the Tao Te Ching are impossible to translate. I have
a variety of translations before me. Lin Yutang's:
"The Tao that can be told of Is not
the Absolute Tao; The Names that can be given Are
not Absolute Names."
is as accurate or inaccurate as
Victor Mair's:
"The ways that can be walked are not
the eternal Way The names that can be named are
not the eternal name."
Perhaps Thomas Cleary's translation
of The Secret of the Golden Flower, itself, in a way, an exegesis
of the Tao Te Ching, is clearer:
"Naturalness is called the Way.
The Way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the
primal spirit."
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets,
elucidates the problem:
"Words strain Crack and sometimes break,
under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide,
perish, Decay with imprecision, will
not stay in place, Will not stay still."
This is certainly close to Laotse's
later statement in the Tao Te Ching
"As soon as one begins to divide
things up, there are names; Once there are names, one
should know when to stop."
We still don't know when to
stop. General Semantics developed as an academic discipline in the West
only in the last half of the 20th Century, two and a half
millennia after Laotse indicated the need. Spinoza wrote "Nature abhors a
vacuum", a phrase illuminating Western Man's intense dislike of
Emptiness. The West rejects the Tao because the Tao cannot be
named. What cannot be named must be empty! That abhorrent vacuum!
The very neural structure of our brains rejects lack of
stimulus. If you haven't already, try the simple ganzfeld experiment of cutting
a ping pong ball in half and placing half over each eye. Keep your
eyes open, facing towards light, looking directly at the white diffuse
field. Time how long it is before you begin to hallucinate. If
the brain is not provided with stimulus, why it just makes it up, as many a
meditator is all too keenly aware!
Of course we know now that even in an
apparent vacuum particles come in and out of existence in the
flash of a nanosecond. Contrary to King Lear something does
come of nothing (and, a little more dismally, according to
entropy, nothing does come of something). Laotse writes, in the
fifth and sixth lines of the Tao Te Ching
"The Nameless is the origin of Heaven
and Earth The Named is the Mother of All
Things."
This is presumably why Adam, even
before God creates Eve, is required to name "every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air....and whatsoever Adam called
every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Gen. 2.21)
Perhaps God, being of the Nameless, could not name Creation.
This appeals to me somewhat more than the representation of God,
Father and Son, I once saw in a slide show presented by Mormon
missionaries. There the Divine Duo, glowing somewhat
radioactively, the very picture of White Muscular Christianity, walked
down a path in Paradise, deep in conversation. I'm afraid
that my interest, academic at best, in Mormonism, dissipated completely
when the missionaries affirmed that Pater and Filius indeed looked
exactly like that. Pathological nominalism created the absurdity of
killing fellow Christians over whether the wafer and wine of
the Mass was the actual body and blood of Christ or just a
metaphor. If this appears irrationally medieval consider that
President Bush justified the first U.S. federal execution in forty
years by asserting that it was "justice not vengeance." Naming
allows us the illusion that we can create and destroy without
consequence. We delude ourselves divine.
It is not that Laotse objects to
naming. On the contrary, the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching,
on the rise of relative opposites, describes clearly the way
in which the initial discriminatory act gives rise to
dualism (yin and yang) and the interdependent multiplicity of the
phenomenal universe: "The Named is the Mother of All
Things." Laotse just insists that we must know when to stop.
Emerson hailed Laotse as the
"circular philosopher". If we draw a circle do we perceive the circle by
the line that inscribes it or by the emptiness it
encloses? The Prajna Paramita, the great sutra of Madhamyika Buddhism, states
that "Form is precisely Emptiness, Emptiness is precisely
Form." We will not discover the wordless through words. The named and
the nameless inextricably interweave in an interdependent
dance. Eventually we must learn to stop, to relax, to cease the
striving, to reach the end of our exploring, where, as Eliot says, we will
"arrive where we started And know the place for the
first time." How do we find that place? It
matters very little whether we are Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, or People
of the Book. All religions, sooner or later, direct us to the
nameless, to the space between thoughts, to the silence which is
only silent because we have stopped telling ourselves what the
silence is. This is the point Eliot calls "the stillness/Between two
waves of the sea." This place is available to us all, requiring only,
as the poet says
"A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than
everything)"
or as Laotse wrote in the Tao
Te Ching "Therefore the Sage puts
himself last, And finds himself in the
foremost place; Regards his body as accidental, And his body is thereby
preserved. Is it not because he does not
live for Self That his Self is realized?"
Is it, or is it not?
Understanding this paradox will lead you to the Tao.
kunzang shenpen (aka marik)
June 2001
marik@aol.com
marik is Mark Defrates, a jeweler
specializing in the symbolism of the world's magickal
traditions. You can view his online catalog at
