Lao Tzu / Tao Teh Ching Translation / Commentary / Herrymon Maurer
2. The Failure of Success
It is the experience of Lao Tzŭ that it is natural for men, women, and children to turn to Tao, and that it is separation from Tao which is unnatural. Turning-toward is life; turning-away is death; and the choice is so momentous that the experience of it exceeds all conventional understanding of good and evil, just as Tao itself is so awesome that it goes beyond all customary descriptions of divinity and all customary methods of organizing society. Once there is turning-toward, there is holding-onto; and holding onto Tao is radically different from believing in myths that explain the universe and enforce conventional moralities of sin and guilt. Tao is not a subject of belief and observance but of direct and factual experience, both of inward and outward reality, which Tao fuses in much the same manner as it brings together the poles of paradox into a unitary flash of insight. Like the Kingdom of Heaven, the Way is outside us but found within us.
Heaven abides; earth lasts.
They last and abide
By not living for themselves.
Hence they live forever.
The Way being within us, we have only to follow inward direction to follow Tao as heaven and earth follow. Tao has nothing to do with that celestial manipulation of man and nature wherein higher powers intervene in the normal courses of fife to make special events happen or not happen. Tao, to be sure, is indeed the ultimate Reality toward whose completeness man, earth, and heaven move. But it is first of all the path along which they travel. Being on the path is as life-giving as reaching the end of it, while being off the path is more death-dealing than ignorance of where the path leads.
If I have a grain of wisdom,
I walk along the great Tao
And only fear to stray.
For the Tao Teh Ching is as negative concerning man and the universe as it is positive and as positive as it is negative. The horror of straying is as tremendous as the wonder of finding, and Lao Tzŭ, in common with other prophetic writers, seldom mentions the one condition without implying at least the other. Indeed, the one seems to come from the other, since moving toward Tao is typically one consequence of being away. It is important to understanding the Tao Teh Ching to avoid explaining any part of it conceptually, since all parts of it emphasize an experience of life that is inherently non-conceptual. Let it be said here simply that people are driven to the comfort of health by the pain of sickness.
The first impact, therefore, of the Tao Teh Ching – even in its positive passages – is negative. How sick sick people are!
On tiptoe you don't stand.
Astride you don't walk.
Showing yourself, you don't shine.
Asserting yourself, you don't show.
Boasting yourself won't get you credit.
Vaunting yourself won't let you endure.
In Tao, these things are called
Tumors and dregs, which all things abhor.
Whoever has Tao does not dwell on them.
When the Tao Teh Ching is used as a critique of our contemporary time of troubles, it is evident that the troubles result not from a series of particular ills but from an attitude toward reality wherein people desert Tao and try to find meaning and motivation in their own selves, or, by self-projection, within their own groups, which can enhance the value of self by devaluing outsiders. Indeed, man's false view of himself, in which he sees himself as the center of the universe, is the key not only to Lao Tzŭ's denunciation of success but also to his praise of Tao. If a man does not follow Tao, or in Western terms worship God, he will have nothing to follow and nothing to worship but himself. The deceit of this idolatry is so pernicious that it becomes a sickness. Other sicknesses of opulence and oppression and violence, whether expressed in hatred of others and a will to stand supreme, or in self-hatred and a will to be overwhelmed, spring from this central deceit.
The positive response to the deceit, in Western terms, is to love and do as you please. Lao Tzŭ says:
Twist and get whole.
Bend and get straight.
Be empty and get filled.
Be worn and get renewed.
Have little: get much.
Have much: get confused.
The sage ... does not show himself,
Hence he shines.
This counsel of wholeness can indeed be followed in times of noise and alarms, but it is no prescription for self-discovery or self-fulfillment. Nor is Lao Tzŭ a mystic in the sense of taking man out of this world to cling to a supermundane deity. Rather Lao Tzŭ sees the link between the reality men and women live by and turn to in their daily lives to be inseparable from the way by which their lives in the outside world are organized. Change the world, you do not thereby change man, and you therefore make no more than superficial changes in the world. Change man, who is infinitely malleable, you change the world.
But there can be no change, individual or social, until men and women are sick enough of self-will to recognize what they are sick with. Otherwise self-will is dismissed as something other people are sick with. Yet even in matters of apparent triviality like the weather, it is everywhere epidemic. The rain, for instance, rains first of all on me. It is so personal to me that I am in a perverse relationship with it, so that it will fall if I don't carry an umbrella, hold off if I do: a line of reasoning I recognize to be slightly ridiculous, but one which I am willing to own to even publicly, with suitably wry humor, out of simple but satisfying self-gratification.
At places of work, shop and office politics are commonly held to be the acts of people of unusually self-centered will. And yet we recognize, through our acquaintance with triumph and failure, that these are places for us, not less than others, to measure our selves against other selves. We seek the status of telling other people what to do; we try to avoid the non-status of being told. When possible, we denigrate the labor of others, if only in our own minds, in favor of our own. We show off. We gossip. We constantly compare. We conspire to have ourselves recognized and others overlooked. Unless, of course, we are aware of the enticements of low-ego, whereby self-will feeds on self-denigration.
Indeed, it makes little difference whether we assert ourselves or deprecate ourselves, so long as attention is focused on ourselves, whether we are sublimely confident or miserably depressed. Nothing focuses attention more forcefully on self than a state of guilt, misery, and general inadequacy. Establishing supremacy often fails, but establishing inferiority always succeeds. Deceits of this sort lead men and women to interpose compulsions and evasions and escapes, not to mention fantasies and compulsions and combats, between themselves and reality: to such a degree, indeed, that it is difficult to distinguish fact from self-will, a state of affairs hardly conducive to work or play.
This situation reverses Lao Tzŭ's saying,
(The sage) does not compete with anyone,
And no one beneath heaven can compete with him
Restated for today, this couplet would read,
Because you compete with others,
Everyone will certainly compete with you.
The consequence is not only competition but also hostility compounded with fear. Places of work have more and more become testing grounds for measuring self against self, arenas for winning sympathy or nursing inferiority, and theatres of hidden conflict and innuendo, in which it is necessary to guard constantly against threats, reprimands, cabals, warnings, and slurs. The enormity of the hidden hostility that pervades offices, schools, and factories is widely overlooked because most people choose not to see beyond the injustices with which they are personally visited. Beyond personal hurt lies a system of semi-organized hostility, in which there is open approval of aggressive self-serving without any economic or pedagogical or organizational purposes. Large enterprise actually functions on the basis of cooperation not competition. Yet work becomes an occasion to pit self-will against self-will.
Such encounter is generally known to be confusing, painful, and exhausting. Yet people still insist on being treated well, while they dream of treating other people ill, an insistence that simply intensifies the encounter. Sometimes hostility rises no higher in intensity than is required to judge others and gossip about them, but not infrequently it erupts in anger and informs us that hostility is indeed an overwhelming urge, not simply a device to achieve superiority or to reinforce inferiority or to do both at once, but also a device to give expression to self, even if the self be alone, withdrawn, and miserable.
Nothing beneath heaven
is softer and weaker than water.
Nothing is better
To attack the hard and strong
And nothing can take its place.
The weak overcome the strong;
The soft overcome the hard.
There is no one beneath heaven
Who doesn't know this,
And no one who practices it ....
Indeed straight words seem crooked!
If, again negatively, we look at ourselves at home, we confront an hostility that forces us to defame the people with whom we live rather than admit our own self-sickness: nothing is wrong with us; something is wrong with, say, the family. Men and women seek closeness, find aloofness; they wish to give love and receive it, but often settle for no more than the projected centeredness on self shown in the narcissistic condition of being in love. Too close to receive and too shackled to give affection, they attempt to be recipients of their own love: a hopeless try since it is futile to receive without giving and impossible to give to self without having given to others.
Without mutuality, a household can come to resemble not so much the barnyard – cattle, sheep, and pigs at least huddle and wallow together – as the chicken coop, in which place individuals busy themselves pecking and being pecked. Who shall be top chicken? Who shall cluck at whom? Who shall strut in front of what? Such questions are settled not by an inward look at self-sickness but by its projection into group life, and the answer is proclaimed that something outside self is wrong, perhaps that ancient device of mutual help, the family. The will to undercut one's spouse, to enlarge gaps between generations, to dominate one's children, to get even with one's parents, deceiving the old and training the young in new deceits (when not actually abusing them), using humor to cut at others, playing roles of consequence in the lives of people nearby, and finding common ground occasionally in gossiping about and contending with other human groupings: all this hen-like hostility is tolerated without realizing that it is literally inhuman. Indeed, all the pettiness and tawdriness and miserable ineptitude of self-will is so contrary to humanity that any human being can give it up whenever he is willing to do so. "Abandon righteousness," advises Lao Tzŭ, "and the people will go back to natural affection." Righteous self-love is not natural; ordinary humble goodness is.
While interchange between family members survives, at least as a means of vocalizing hostilities, conversation as the ancient mainstay of household pleasure has given way to solitary pursuits, in particular the watching of television, which appears to be a cultural choice of a people who have determined that dialogue must at all costs be killed. It is only incidentally the function of television to tell lies, stimulate fears, enthrall with violence, and besot the emotions. The prime function of television is simply to keep people watching television. It is a projected self that makes it difficult to do at home anything other than keeping to one's self and savoring the artificial spice of canned hostility. Hostility nowadays is said to have invaded the bed chamber, where affection was long believed to prevail. Some three hundred years ago, in a pamphlet pleading against government cruelty and religious intolerance, William Penn wrote, "Nothing but kindness keeps up the human race. Men and women don't get children in spite of but because of affection. 'Tis wonderful to think by what friendly and gentle ways nature produces and matures the creatures of this world." We are now informed by not a few students of the emotions that hostility is more important in the sexual act than affection. And we are assured by not a few students of eroticism that solitary sex is more gratifying than partner sex, and that partner sex itself needs enhancing by sex of a group or semi-group sort, whether practiced all at once or in series.
How much sexual latitudinarianism has increased in incidence is unknown, but the publicity given to it has increased greatly. It would seem that there is a growing interest in sex with unknown persons who excite because of their unfamiliarity (let alone in solitary sex and hostile sex) and a preference for it over sex with known persons for whom affection can be felt. This preference can hardly be possible except among persons who want to interact with themselves. Sexual relationships with a multitude of people or with a succession of people appear to be little more than relationships with a variety of organs and thus little more than symptoms of the anti-eroticism that has so long characterized Western civilization, according to whose conventions people are supposed to be splendidly single and not close to one another.
Happily, people are not what they are supposed to be. But neither are they what they are capable of being. While most men and women have unconscious acquaintance with the Way sufficient to make them shun the more drastic departures from it, they generally remain blind to the deep lodgment of hostility and willfulness and fear within them. Men and women have really only two alternatives: to follow the Way or not to follow it. To follow it somewhat more than persons who actively shun it, as do men of outward selfishness and violence, may harm fewer people but does little to increase inward well-being or decrease social evil. Ordinary egocentrics are not less miserable than extreme ones, and their misery is no less contagious. For inward misery, be it remembered, is the chief consequence of straying from Tao, not simply blame and guilt.
Of those who actively shun Tao, Lao Tzŭ says:
The great Tao is easy indeed,
But the people choose by-paths.
The court is very resplendent;
Very weedy are the fields,
And the granaries very empty.
They wear gaudy clothes,
Carry sharp swords,
Exceed in eating and drinking,
Have riches more than they can use
Call them robber-braggarts;
They are anti-Tao indeed!
This denunciation hits at the people in any epoch, not alone the early Chinese epoch, who are autocratic, competitive, self-conscious, class-conscious, superstitious, deceitful, violent, and oppressive. But the denunciation extends also to those persons who are opposed precisely to these characteristics. Interposing good causes between oneself and Tao is not much different in its inward effects from interposing bad causes. In our days of compulsively neurotic interposition, those who chase after good causes are much more numerous than those who chase after bad ones. Indeed, one measure of the inward crisis that grips so many people is the failure of good-intending, self-intending individuals to find themselves in any causes, whatever their nature.
Indeed, the search for self - the self that is ecstatic or the self that is miserable - distracts attention from the true path along which such good things as justice and peace are to be found, and it breeds, when they are not found, fear, rage, guilt, depression, aloneness, alienation, and deceit. Even when the self becomes dubious about success on individual terms and seeks it in dedication to gurus and groups, it still follows its failed fantasies and resentments and compulsions and competitions. The mind is set to work to keep reality away and, mindless of its devices, is left at the mercy of unconscious posturings.
When Tao is lost, there is virtue.
When virtue is lost, there is humaneness.
When humaneness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ceremony.
Now ceremony is the shell
Of loyalty and trust
And the beginning of confusion.
For what is less than Tao is not more than confusion. In the pursuit of good ends, success fails not alone because means and ends are out of harmony but because the inward drive that underlies both means and ends is out of harmony with life, with Tao. The very notion of success, in the sense of gathering power for a good purpose and using it to achieve that purpose, means more often than not the failure of the good purpose. When success is used consciously as a means, it is usually sought unconsciously as an end: some such end as taking intellectual stances or moral positions that serve as secret advertisements for one's self. The power that is sought to make these positions prevail is not so much the power to get things done as it is the power to tell other people what to do, not so much for making other people free as for making them do what is good for them, not so much for casting down unrighteousness as for displaying self-righteousness. When other persons try to foist their intellectual, social, or moral convictions upon us, we see their hidden motivations clearly, but when we do the same, we fail to recognize even the foisting.
The fascination with power among people of libertarian intention lies in the fact that power is the act of impressing one's own will or the will of one's group on others, regardless of the size of the issues involved, be they large ones of state or small ones of daily life. An obvious power play is manipulating children to act affectionately instead of demonstrating how to go about being affectionate. When affection fails at home, just as when peace fails abroad, the answer is more power. Few peace-making parents are alert to their tyranny over their offspring.
Let me take as example a personal conviction about peace. I am stricken by the possibility of atomic destruction and convinced that it is increased by armaments and threats of war. To help break the chain of violence that links humankind to war, I insist that my mental analysis of violence bred by violence be accepted by enough people to force those in power to change their minds. And I argue for my understanding of past history, current events, and future projections. I undertake to gather large crowds of marching and shouting demonstrators, and I court publicity for them, hopefully television publicity. I parade with colorful signs and striking costumes. I orate emotionally; I call names; I demonstrate; I stir fear. I tell other people what to do. But other people, precisely the other people whose minds I seek to alter, see very clearly that what I am really seeking is the power to become a celebrity, an authority figure, and a self-righteous prig who knows what is good for other people and is simply going to put other people down. Lao Tzŭ writes:
Give up wisdom, abandon knowledge,
And the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Give up benevolence, abandon righteousness,
And the people will go back to natural affection.
Give up cunning, abandon gain,
And robbers and thieves will disappear.
In self-righteousness lies the final failure of success. The call of all the prophetic teachers is for goodness, but when goodness is measured against the goodness of other people, it ceases to be good and becomes divisive and self-righteous. Faced with such alternatives, the true prophets choose not to succeed. They fail not alone in worldly terms, but even in terms of their goal of turning people to Truth. They fail repeatedly. Their true victories, which belong not to them but to Truth itself, arise out of their repeated failures. Moses emerges as an awesome teacher, for example, not in spite of but because of the series of repeated setbacks he suffers tragically in the midst of the desert wanderings as he tries to lead the people to a new sense of God; and at the very end of the wandering he fails even to gain entry into the promised land. Jeremiah cries out, "Seekest thou great things; seek them not," and finds himself outcast by men who "oppress and oppress, deceive and deceive." Gautama was so much a failure that he turned his back on his own courts and palaces. And Jesus, who aimed his teaching at the poor and unlettered, spoke harshly of the self-righteous and was himself so little a success that he suffered the death of a criminal.
Himself a dropout and probably a castoff, Lao Tzŭ too rejected success and found, in common with other teachers like him, victory in the simple reality of the Way, that Way by which man can be healed inwardly in his dealings with others and outwardly through the realization of it in the outward world. Once the way is sensed, things inward and outward fit readily into place. Men and women look within themselves and look outside themselves, and in both directions they see purpose and direction and meaning in life.
Perhaps this is a victory that can come to every person who learns to know the failure of success. When Tao is shunned, men and women look within themselves and find nothing more than a meaninglessness they try to overcome through self-awareness, consciousness-raising, and other egocentric stirrings that prompt them to seek success. Primarily, that search is a search for meaning, for something that will justify them in their lives and confirm them in their beings. But when the search leads to a power over others that can be supported only by the illusion of self-righteousness, the attractiveness of success is seen as illusion; success itself finally fails; and search must be started elsewhere. For righteousness is more and more widely seen as a cloak worn on top of success and failure, praise and blame by people who are trying to hide the tawdriness of their undergarments. Out of these torments, there can come a new attitude toward life and a new way of life.
The great Tao flows everywhere;
It can go to the right or the left.
The ten thousand things draw life from it,
And it does not deny them.
It completes its work, but takes no title.
It clothes and feeds the ten thousand things.
But does not own them.
You can call it small.
The ten thousand things return to it,
But it does not own them.
You can call it great.
Because it does not seek to be great,
Its greatness is accomplished.
