Tao te ching_ annotated & explained - Derek Lin [1]
Word has it that one day some disciples found the elder Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu in front of his house, sitting peacefully on the ground in the sun with his fresh-washed long hair cascading down around him. The students gathered around him and waited patiently. “What are you doing, Master?” they finally asked. “Drying my hair in the sun,” the old sage replied. “Can we help you?” they wanted to know. “How can you help me; what is there that that needs to be done? My hair is being dried by the sun, and I am resting at the origin of all things.”
This enigmatic story concerns the inner journey to the very center of things, beyond the dichotomy of doing and being and yet including both. The Taoist sages exemplify harmony and serenity, oneness, authenticity, and the spontaneous flow of naturalness. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. That’s really somethin’, ain’t it?
When I myself don’t know what to do, which is surprisingly often, I try to take the Tao Te Ching’s advice on the subject and do nothing, along the lines of the core Taoist notion of wu wei, which can be translated as “nonstriving.” Overdoing things has produced so much more harm than good in this busy world; I think we’d do well to learn how to undo the habit of overdoing. The nineteenth-century enlightened vagabond and Tibetan Dzogchen master Patrul Rinpoche sums it up like this: “Beyond action and inaction the sublime Dharma is accomplished.” This is the sublime peace of the Tao, something we can all experience by learning to live in the Tao through coming into accord with how things actually are—what Tibetan Buddhists call the natural state. Rather than trying to build skyscrapers to reach heaven and bridges to cross the raging river of samsara to reach the so-called other shore of nirvana, we could realize that it all flows right through us right now and there’s nowhere to go, nothing to get, and all is perfect as it is. This deep inner knowing has a lot to do with trust and letting be; there is nirvanic peace in things just as they are.
This should not be misconstrued as a rationalization for mere quietism, cold indifference, passivity, or dropping out. Five hundred years before Jesus, Taoists taught passive resistance, a crucial element of world-changing modern spiritual activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. The ancient masters revealed how to be steadfast and supple, like water—flowing rather than fixed, rigid, or static—which is of great benefit, for water is stronger than even stone: water’s constant flow will eventually wear anything down and carry everything away. Like the underlying continuum of reality, the great Tao is groundless and boundless; it is flowing, dynamic, yet unmoved amidst infinite change. “Yield and overcome, and you cannot be broken,” they taught. “Bend and be straight.” These are powerful words, truth spoken to power. Wisdom is as wisdom does. Awakening oneself awakens the whole world.
A little Tao goes a long way. The Tao Te Ching should be savored leaf by leaf, line by line, like haiku poetry—read and enjoyed, pondered, and reread again. These finely wrought, provocative, ultimate utterances are chock full of one-sentence sermons encapsulating universal wisdom in a charming, poetic form that leaves room for more interpretation than a Rorschach inkblot. Here we can find evocative pearls of wisdom concerning the mysteries of yin and yang and the manner in which the great Middle Way balances, harmonizes, and reconciles primordial dichotomies such as light and dark, heaven and earth, good and evil, man and woman, doing and being, life and death. These sublime little sutras have edified, instructed,