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By Root 116 0

to be in the service of such a text is to be in the presence of ancient masters in the Confucian sense as well. Lao Tzu is good company as well as a wise teacher. He likes to talk about human nature and politics. He is congenially available and convivial. But he also reminds us that he is the master and we are here to learn.

Civilizations rise and fall, and the wisdom of the Old Master is ever-present, seeing us through it all. The agonies of his time and the agonies of our time are not so different. The way to inner (and social) peace and harmony remains the same. To follow the way, one must first become the thunderbolt that lights the sky and shakes one’s world free of brutal illusions before embodying the calm. Twenty-five hundred years later, the message of the Tao Te Ching is every bit as revolutionary as the day Lao Tzu, legend says, wrote it out and simply vanished. Every decent translator would love to become so transparent, to vanish . . . if not from, then into the poetry.

—Sam Hamill

Kage-an, December 2004

Tao Te Ching

Tao (“Tao”): The two parts of the character—one depicting an eye in a head and the other a foot—when taken together mean “way,” “path,” or “road,” both literally and philosophically. If we remove the “eyebrow” over the “eye,” and place the “eye” over the “walking foot,” we get the character for “to look” or “to see.” The head here also suggests the moon and the harmony of the tides, light and dark, and the forces of nature.

1.

Tao defined is not the constant Tao.

No name names its eternal name.

The unnamable is the origin of heaven and earth;

named, it is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Emptied of desire, we see the mystery;

filled with desire, we see the manifestation of things.

Two names emerge from a single origin,

and both are called mysterious,

and the mystery itself is the gateway to perception.

2.

Beauty and ugliness have one origin.

Name beauty, and ugliness is.

Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.

Is and is not produce one another.

The difficult is born in the easy,

long is defined by short, the high by the low.

Instrument and voice achieve one harmony.

Before and after have places.

That is why the sage can act without effort

and teach without words,

nurture things without possessing them,

and accomplish things without expecting merit:

only one who makes no attempt to possess it

cannot lose it.

3.

Bestow no honors,

and reduce contentiousness.

Cling to no treasures,

and create no thieves.

Make no seductive displays,

and hearts and minds remain settled.

The sage governs

by emptying minds and hearts

and filling bellies;

by weakening wishes and strengthening bones;

by leading away from pointless learning

and the labyrinths of desire;

by inhibiting the actions of those who know too much.

Practicing not-acting

allows natural order to be restored.

4.

Tao is empty

but inexhaustible,

bottomless,

the ancestor of it all.

It blunts rough edges,

untangles the knots,

diffuses the glare,

at one with the dust of the world.

In depthless depths it is

whose child—

born before antiquity?

5.

Heaven and earth are not humane.

The ten thousand things are mere straw dogs to them.

The sage is not humane,

treating people like straw dogs.

Between heaven and earth

is a space like a bellows,

empty and inexhaustible,

forever producing more.

Too many words are exhausting.

Hold fast to the center.

T’ien (“Heaven”): The radical (or root word) of this character means “great,” “noble,” “big,” or simply “very,” and shows a person with arms wide open. With one stroke added at the top of the radical it becomes “heaven,” “sky,” or even “paradise.”

6.

The Valley Spirit never dies,

and is called Mysterious Female.

The gateway to the Mysterious Female

we call the root of creation.

On and on, its energy flows,

inexhaustibly.

7.

Heaven is eternal. The earth endures.

The reason for heaven’s eternity and earth’s endurance

is that they do not live for themselves only,

and thereby