It has become obvious that conventional ways of living are culminating in a violence that, unless forsworn, can eliminate life itself. It has been assumed that knowledge of such danger is the best preventative of it. But danger grows, not because its consequences are unknown but because its inward roots are unrecognized. Whatever may be the origins of violence in general, today's violence is rooted in Western man's habit of persisting in himself, existing in himself, and relating to himself whatever happens. It is shown in his telling other people what to do and, failing of forcing them, trying to force them, or manipulating them. It is displayed in his practice of expressing himself in word and in action, in preference to expressing anything else to any other being. It is demonstrated more obviously in assaults in the streets, arson in the cities, threats and skirmishes among the nations. It is ultimately disclosed in preparations for Armageddon, for which terminal event, the nations, imbued with notions of self-defense and fears of aggression, devise the elimination of vast numbers if not the whole of mankind. The plan is to prevent wars against people. But the too likely consequence is eliminating the people.

But it may well be that people – people counted by the head to the number of billions – are likely to be annihilated not in spite of themselves but because of their selves. It may be that life-obliterating war is the cultural choice of men, women, and children whose inward violence (even if expressed in nothing more than contentiousness at home and competitiveness at work: or, conversely, self-anger and inadequacy at both places) creates the emotional soil for national and international plagues. Certainly, it is unlikely that there will be peace abroad until it is made welcome at home.

For even the opposition to violence is filled with violence: the violence of people of apparent good will who know no other way of life than doing their own thing and telling other people what to do. Among such people the inward symptoms of violence often multiply: the confusion, frustration, fear, guilt, self-hate, depression, loneliness, and like distempers of men and women who are at the mercy of their unconscious minds, trained for centuries in the contentious ways of convention. It is not that scientific discovery has outstripped spiritual growth, as so often stated, but that self has dispossessed spirit and confused even the common understanding of reality.

But there is another way: a way of experiencing reality and living in it. It is a way based on all of reality – all of a man's being and all of nature's workings – and not on a partial reality based on self-willed urges to overcome other people and conquer nature. It is a way to overcome violence, socially and personally. Perhaps it can be called the other way, for the ways that work against violence are all the same way.

Something there is, without form and complete,

Born between heaven and earth.

Solitary and vast,

Standing alone without change,

Everywhere pervading all things,

Mothering all beneath heaven.

I don't know its name;

I style it Tao,

And for want of a name call it great.
 

This one way is traced in many and diverse scriptures. It is the word as it came to Moses, to Gautama, to Isaiah, to Mohammed, to Jesus, and to many other prophets who have found the Ultimate and have sought words to describe their finding. Their way is actually not so difficult to follow as it is hard to locate. It is not now a topic of general conversation, and there are few literary and scholarly productions in which to read about it, although conventional rationalizings abound.

Sometimes the scriptural sourceworks seem forbidding because they are claimed as possessions by people of moralistic self-will, if not of ill will and violent will. In recent times, inspired writings about Truth have been ratiocinated out of their actual meanings into monstrous conventionalisms of a so-called religious sort, embraced variously by militarists in Thailand when calling upon Buddha, by terrorist mullahs in Iran when seeking approval from the Qu'ran, by Argentine gangsters when rushing to the defense of torture, and by salvationist me-firsters throughout the world when claiming inerrant scriptural support for false righteousness, legalistic dogmatism, and suicidal national-statism. The new way of life to be found in the scriptures is to be found by an unconventional reading of them, that is, a prophetic and liberating reading, not a priestly, moralistic, and confining one. Obvious obstacles are doctrinaire veneration and self-serving misquotation.

Indeed, if Westerners are ever to let their own scriptures speak to them, it may be wise to try first to understand those of other places where false familiarity and pseudo-sanctity are less likely to be barriers. It is the venture of this book about Tao – literally, the Way – to translate and comment on a Chinese scripture that can lead to a discovery of the same Way in scriptures nearer at hand. In the life of the writer, a similar venture with this same scripture, the primary work of the Taoist canon, led to his finding again the Jewish and Christian scriptures in which he was reared and in which, quite literally, he continues to have his being. If it be said that man is not to be inspired by scriptures foreign to his upbringing, that none but the natives are to be saved, and that God will not listen to all his children but only to those with a particular interpretation of particular parts of a particular scripture, then it is necessary for those who seek the will of Truth rather than their own to cry sacrilege, for the offense is against God and consists of an ultimate violence that denies his love for his children, his presence within them, and his converse with them.

As for Lao Tzŭ, an anti-conventional sage who sought peace by keeping himself hidden, he can be introduced succinctly as the first dropout:

Whoever keeps to Tao

Does not want to be full.

Not full, he can practice

Concealment instead of accomplishment.
 

For, twenty-five hundred years ago, an old man who distrusted princes, decried rituals, and disliked names dropped out of the empire of Chou and went into exile. He left behind a book of some five thousand characters, called for the last two thousand years the Tao Teh Ching – the Tao Virtue Classic – which is today as it has long been the great sensation of Asian literature and Asian scripture. He wrote with vividness, with starkness, with simplicity, not without humor, and with such force that his short work bred Taoism, shaped Buddhism, led to Ch'an and Zen meditation, created Chinese landscape painting, influenced profoundly not so much what was done in China as the manner in which it was done, and served as a guidebook for persons everywhere who look for the inward power that brings inward meaning and comfort. To Westerners the book is important not primarily because of its past effect in Asia but because of its potential effect in a Western world that has so obviously lost its way and is trying so desperately to find a new one. Tao is the Way in the sense of the path; and the Tao Teh Ching, which appeared in the early morning of historical time, describes one of a variety of paths through life that, to repeat, have always been the same Way.

The first fact about this particular Way is that the man who wrote about it had no name. Lao Tzŭ is a description rather than an appellation. It can mean old philosopher or old sir, but it can also mean old child or old fellow. Lao Tzŭ kept himself so well hidden that very little is known of him except what he wrote. His early biographer, Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien, records a few titles and a few places, chronicles a chronologically impossible meeting with Confucius, and has not more of substance to report than the following:

"He was a man indeed ... In the State of Chou, he was historian in charge of the secret archives ...

"Lao Tzŭ practiced Tao and virtue. His teaching was the concealment of self and not having names. He lived for a long time in the State of Chou, but foreseeing its decay he departed and came to the frontier. The officer of the frontier was of the name Yin Hsi. He said, 'Sir, you are about to dropout. I urge you to write a book for me.'

"Lao Tzŭ then wrote a book of a first and second part, discussing Tao and virtue, and he wrote five thousand and some characters. Then he departed.

"No one knows where he died." That is all. But that little could be still less without changing the impact of the book of Tao, which depends on its author not being known. Scholarly doubts have been expressed as to whether Lao Tzŭ lived when he is said to have lived and even whether he lived at all. But his non-existence or his existence at any time else would only dramatize his concealment of self and not having names. He is, in convention's eyes, scandalously against self.

He is also against the autocratic, the patriarchal, the hierarchic, the superstitious, the ritualistic, the oppressive, and the violent. Such opposition was indeed unconventional, but it was not in itself scandalous. The completeness of Lao Tzŭ's scandal was his dropping out of Chinese civilization to live among the barbarians. It was a scandal as great to the Chinese as Hosea's taking a whore to wife was to the Israelites or as Jesus dying the death of a criminal was to the Romans. It was an act of unsurpassable uncouthness, a topsy-turvying of civilization itself. As the Jews put down temple prostitutes and as the Romans put down subversives, so did the Chinese throughout their history put down the barbarians to the north and west of their country. Their moral weakness was the mark of Chinese superiority. Indeed, the flight of their old Sage to the people they despised remains an eternal symbol of the despicability of conventional success.

Martin Buber suggests that it is because of this despicability that Lao Tzŭ's teaching of following Tao and doing nothing can reach out in a living manner to Westerners as no other Asian teaching can reach out. "We have begun to learn," writes Buber, "that success is of no consequence. We have begun to doubt the significance of historical success, i.e. the validity of the man who sets an end for himself, carries this end into effect, accumulates the necessary means of power and succeeds with these means of power: the typical modern Western man. I say, we begin to doubt the content of existence of this man. And there we come in contact with . . . the teaching that genuine effecting is not interfering, not giving vent to power, but remaining within oneself . . . . With us this knowledge does not originate as wisdom but as foolishness . . . . But there where we stand or there where we shall soon stand, we shall directly touch the reality for which Lao Tzŭ spoke."

Does anyone want to take the world And act on it?

I don't see how he can succeed.

The world is a sacred vessel

Not to be acted on.

Whoever acts on it spoils it;

Whoever grasps at it loses it.

For Lao Tzŭ speaks about the joy of following a way of life, not about the tension of acting on the world and chasing success or about winning a reputation and making a big splash. He writes about a meeting, a relationship with Tao, with nature, with other persons: not about obeying one or another set of precepts and persisting in them against all comers. He proposes an attitude toward life that is full of warmth and awe, and not a reaction against life that finds fault, assigns praise and blame, determines guilt, and passes judgment. He demonstrates an ever-new way of thinking that puts to work the entire being of man and not simply the isolated function of cogitation. He emphasizes the Tao-given capacity of this being to fit in with creation so long as he does not demand that creation fit in with him.

He does not simply castigate success and substitute for success castigation; he demonstrates an entirely different manner of being alive. Moreover, he promises, through the following of the Way, a deliverance from the torments of ego, from guilts and anxieties, from rages and deceits, from denials and depressions, and from the violence and aloneness that attend the failure of success:

Therefore the sage

Puts himself last,

Finds himself first.

Abandons his self,

Preserves his self.

Is it not because he has no self

That he is able to realize his self?

For persons brought up on counsels of achievement and self-reliance, the possibility of self-abandonment seems at first as remote as it is unwanted. The pain that success-seeking inflicts on people is typically seen by them not as something they inflict on themselves but as something inflicted upon them by external circumstances, often in the form of other competing people. (Thus it is possible to self-inflict new pain to distract from old.) For persons brought up on praise and blame, giving up guilt seems like nothing less than the defeat of a law and order, since they see principles and precepts as the moral adornments of successful people, even though it is obvious that dedication to principle is characteristic of dictators and scoundrels of the sort who exist to punish those who differ from them. Indeed, a great demand of Western society, imposed alike by people of ill-will and good-will, is ideological purity, an inescapable consequence of trying to make self the center of the cosmos. To persons educated in the conventional Western manner, cogitation of the sterile sort practiced by social, scholarly, political, theological, and military dogmatists is generally held to be man's last best hope, since salvation – personal or social – is supposed to result from concepts that will control nature, society, other selves, and even one's own self. Self-will's basic urge is to control something.

The goals pursued by the will to control may be good in themselves, such as seeking peace and eliminating oppression. But so long as the conventional tools of power and will are used, so long as it impossible to achieve the goals sought. Probably, it is from the use of these conventional tools that wars and conflicts arise. The ineffectiveness of the peace movement throughout most of the twentieth century may well result from its attempt to be successful in a war against war. It has been effective only when it renounced conventional tools, as did Gandhi's non-violent campaigns in India, perhaps the only instances of effective group effort for peace in the century. Underlying the testimony of Gandhi is the same relationship to life that underlies the book of Tao: a deep prophetic awareness of the power of the spiritual reality that undergirds all life, together with a realization that this power can produce tremendous changes in society that cannot be produced conventionally. Outward effort for peace and justice is fruitful only when it is part of a profound inward change in man's basic awareness of life.

This altered awareness involves new relationships with Truth, with the heavens, with earth, and with other men and women: relationships that would commonly be considered obstacles to the life of achievement, if they were to be considered at all. Indeed, the very word relationship is currently in process of debasement, whereby it is becoming a circumlocution for sexual connection. Most people feel themselves alone so intensely that it is difficult for them to sense the possibility of interacting with anyone else. Any change in established patterns of intellect and emotion appears unimaginable to most Westerners.

And yet it has been widely recognized since early in the twentieth century that these apparently immutable patterns are no more than a matter of cultural choice and not a matter of innate human condition. Indeed, the human condition itself, in various living cultures throughout the world, gives evidence that man's nature is in no way immutably fixed but rather infinitely malleable, and that a wide variety of choices are open alike to people and peoples, particularly since the Western epoch is widely believed to be ending, if it be not ended already.

Things that flourish fall into decay.

This is not-Tao,

And what is not-Tao soon ends.

And the Bible declares the word of the Lord, "Behold I make all things new!"  There is as yet little impetus to see the new things and to follow new paths, even among persons who make much of their lifestyles and pursue, variously, personal meditation, communal living, political activism, sexual latitudinarianism, disordered dress, environmental protection, chemical intoxication, criminal assaults, and terrorist and other agitations. The dead hand of the past is as heavy upon the apparently liberated as it is upon the obviously hidebound. For the essence of conventionality is the belief, so deeply rooted as to be largely unconscious, that the universe revolves around every single human being, that everything that happens must be related first of all to that single being, and that meaning in life is to be found through self-expression and the assertion of self-will. In such will, the bomb-thrower is one with the bible-thumper, the criminal one with the righteous, the reformer one with the unreconstructed. Even the outs are one with the ins, for Western egocentrism is now being exported with Western technology. There is a new fervor for self-will: in recent decades ego-centrists have been calling for it with the desperation of addicts clamoring for the drugs that kill them.

For such addictions, scriptures of the Way have a simple answer. Lao Tzŭ words it in this manner:

To know and to be unknowing is best;

Not to know and to be knowing is sickness.

Only by being sick of our sickness

Are we not sick.

The sage is not sick.

He is sick of his sickness

And therefore not sick.

This answer is no different from Isaiah's counsel to turn from serving self to serving God or from Jesus' insistence on saving one's life by losing it and losing one's life by saving it. But the answer cannot be heard clearly until people, everywhere or anywhere, are literally sick of their sickness: sick of trying to establish a personal self over against other selves, sick of seeking to maximize self, sick of clamoring for self-superiority or, what amounts to the same thing, self-inferiority, sick of compulsions, competitions, contests, and the consequent destruction of the true self and of other selves through violent adventurism, psychological or physical or both.

The answer is by no means unfamiliar to Westerners, for prophetic Truth has survived among us, as among most peoples, as a persistent if minor cultural theme, one customarily unnoticed but never entirely forgotten. Truth seems at times to stir in our hearts, informing us without conscious awareness that there are such realities as meaning and affection and the very Truth itself. But it is difficult to act on such promptings if we try to act alone. Even when we become sick of our sickness, we do not get well if we have not the example of other selves to follow. No self gets over self-sickness by its own self.

It is told of Francois de Sales that, when asked how to love God, he counter-questioned, "How does a child learn to walk?" And he explained that a child learns to walk by walking. To anybody but Westerners of do-it-yourself propensities, such a method of self-teaching would appear nonsensical. A child does not learn to walk by himself: he learns to walk by watching the people around him walk. We ourselves can learn to love God only by watching other people love him: or at least by watching their first steps of accepting Truth and becoming mindful of it. Since such activities are nowadays infrequent, alike among those who claim to have found God and those who claim to have found him not, they can be seen most clearly in the scriptures of times past.

Why did the ancients prize Tao?

Because if it is sought, it is found.

Because the guilty are forgiven.

It can be argued that contemporary thought is superior to past thought and that Truth characterizes only the up-to-date. Such are the arguments of Western conventionalism. However dubious their logic, their function is to support the role of self as the center of all that exists. Whether spoken in scientific or religious terms, they have no word concerning the violence that overflows from self-worship – miserable alternative to the worship of the Way – and threatens to engulf the world and consume it. They have no word concerning inward torments of ego that are shaking the mind or with tortures of guilt that are bewildering the emotions. To these things scripture alone speaks.

But here it is essential to distinguish again between those parts of the scriptures which record the voice of the prophets and those parts which are the work of the legalists and the priests, groups who typically seek to institutionalize Truth as well as conventionalize it. Such persons edit the language of the prophets, altering or confusing the original meaning; they add propositions and regulations of their own and make of them a dogmatic literature, misinterpreting or slighting the very word they declare to be unerring, favoring instead contemporary credal constructions, and ignoring in the process the relationship between man and man, the key to man's relationship with God.

Certainly it is natural for anything so important to mankind as the scriptures to be edited, if only to make the original works comprehensible to later generations of men and women. A book that is meaningful enough to be considered inspired is bound to have been rewritten and annotated out of much of its original form: a process that is discernable in our own time in the alterations made in the writings of such men as John Woolman and Mohandas Gandhi. The language of prophetic scripture has to change if its witness to that which does not change is to retain its power. It is not such editing that weakens scripture's impact but rather the revisionism of those publicists who temporize with the changeless by explaining it, in the process adding much of their own, taking away much of the original, and confusing much of the rest.

The imperative task of disentangling scripture from the revision of it is complicated by the necessity of knowing what the whole grain of scripture is before trying to separate the chaff from it. This work is far easier with a scripture foreign to one's own tradition, simply because notions of inerrant sanctity do not attach to it. The work is made still easier with the Tao Teh Ching because many of the later alterations made in its meaning appear in separate volumes of the Taoist canon, there being relatively few in the extant edition of the original book itself.

Explicit in the Tao Teh Ching, moreover, is that sense of reality implicit in all prophetic scripture, a sense that sees the penetration of physical creation by spiritual force: not the existence side-by-side of two distinct realms, but their acting together in the single realm of reality. This interaction is beyond verbal definition to such a degree that it can also be imagined as non-action, the nothing-doing that is one of Lao Tzŭ's major themes. Tao is, indeed, on top of everything as well as into everything, and certainly beyond the names used by scientists, logicians, and other dogmatists to pigeonhole reality. It is everything so much that it is beyond legalisms, beyond rules and observances, beyond morals and legislations, beyond notions of blame and guilt. It is indeed in and beyond everything, just as it is also just nothing: the remarkable nothing that penetrates all reality from the space inside atoms and the space that supports and creates stars to that inwardness which is peculiar to mankind and which includes everything human in its nothingness. For it includes spirit and mind, conscious thought and subliminal emotion, in addition to every aspect of the human body in all its own multiplicity. We appear to be, in other words, somethingness in combination with nothingness, in which the somethingness cannot exist without the nothingness, and in which the nothingness often speaks directly to our inward ears in a way that can be described only by analogy:

Thirty spokes share one hub;

In emptiness lies the wheel's utility.

Kneading clay makes a pot;

In emptiness lies the pot's utility.

Cutting doors and windows makes a room,

In emptiness lies the room's utility.

Gain can be had from somethingness,

But use can be had from nothingness.

In the light of such emptiness, Lao Tzŭ records a series of insights into and intimacies with the ways of creation and the ways of man. The insights are in no sense explanations of the universe; they are not ideas or myths or beliefs. They are simply glimpses of what is and records of experiencing what is. Lao Tzŭ's message is not that his readers should believe in what he says in order to achieve a salvation of some sort, but rather that they should accept reality and turn to it, enjoying, as a consequence, inward well-being: a sort of spiritual hedonism in which there is joy and meaning and vitality, however much these may coexist with pain and sorrow and suffering. Tao is the Way in exactly the same manner in which God is Truth.

Like other scriptures of Truth, the book of Tao does not go out of date. It is genuinely open-ended, for its single witness is the reality of Tao, however Tao may manifest itself at one time or another. Set down in writing perhaps in the sixth century B.C., it is a creation of a remarkable time. To that century belong also the writings of Gautama, Jeremiah, and Confucius. But it remains pertinent to all times simply because the Way remains the Way, just as Truth remains Truth, simplicity remains simplicity, non-violence remains non-violence, and the God of these prophetic witnesses remains the God of the prophets.

If Tao can be Taoed, it's not Tao.

If its name can be named, it's not its name.

Has no name: precedes heaven and earth.

Has a name: mother of ten thousand things ....

Mystery of mysteries, the door to inwardness!

The way of convention is to give names to all things in the universe out of a petty will to control life. The names may attach to matter or monsters, duties or deities, objects or operations, but they represent an effort to dominate reality through the agency of abstract cogitation. Lao Tzŭ disagrees. 'When law and order arose," he writes, "names appeared. Aren't there enough already? Is it not time to stop?' His practice and his counsel is not to name things but to be intimate with them. Truth itself is beyond name, and the name of Tao cannot be its name. Is not God, the God of all the scriptures, forever the One who is nameless and unknown and undefined?

The opposite of naming names is creating paradoxes, and Lao Tzŭ eschews the former and embraces the latter even more fervently than do the writers of other scriptures. Sometimes mistaken for witticism or for a turning upside down of things as they are, paradox provides insight into the awesome inexplicability of life. It is not, of course, to be defined, being hostile to names by nature. It has no laws. It can be described only as it behaves: it repeats apparent opposites again and again so that the veil of words, poor indicators of a reality beyond cogitation, can be rent by the clash of apparently conflicting experience. Paradox cuts across the accumulated thickness of words and illuminates as it flashes. It enlightens where cogitation fails. In ages of bronze or plutonium, it is the only alternative to names.

There can never be a study of it. Look at it, and you will not see it. See it, and you will not have to took at it. Any attempt to describe it, except by paradox, leads nowhere, for it hovers somewhere just at the edge of human understanding. It is like a fleeting motion seen from the corner of the eye only when the eye's center is focused elsewhere. Only one definitive statement can be made about it, and that is that it is not really paradoxical. For Lao Tzŭ celebrated rather than analyzed the mysteriousness of life. He did not wonder about the universe but felt wonder towards it. He responded with awe, conveyed without logic simply through a series of affirmations of what is omnipresent both in the heavens and in the hearts of men and women and children.

Paradox is perplexing to Westerners brought up on names. To such persons Lao Tzŭ can seem lacking in pertinence because lacking in familiarity. The commentary that accompanies this translation is designed to familiarize the Western reader with Tao and to further his acquaintance by suggesting Tao's pertinence to him in his own time and place. But once the commentary has provided such introduction, it can be put aside. Lao Tzŭ's meaning is best assimilated by repetitive reading. Prophecy and paradox speak best for themselves.

True words are not nice;

Nice words are not true.

A good man does not argue;

An arguer is not good.

The wise are not learned;

The learned are not wise.

The intent of the Tao The Ching is to speak about the unspeakable, and, as Lao Tzŭ points out, "He who speaks does not know, and he who knows does not speak." In reading about Tao, it is wise to sense the possibility and even the necessity of being intimate with the Reality which it would be presumptuous to understand. Lao Tzŭ is close to Tao with an intimacy he recommends across the ages to us.