Lao Tzu / Tao Teh Ching Translation / Commentary / Herrymon Maurer
2. Nothing-Wanting
The Tao Teh Ching is purposefully non-sequential, carefully repetitive, and intentionally non-conclusive. It is not trying to get anywhere since it is there already. One saying comes after another, often repeating the other without following the precedences of logic. The book itself is an insight. Composed on many separate insights, its method, arrangement, and purpose are themselves insights. And they are all of one piece. Gandhi used to say that the three aspects of Truth, simplicity, and non-violence have only one aspect. Wholeness is the essence of nothing-doing, nothing-knowing, and nothing-wanting.
Keep to simplicity,
Grasp the primal,
Reduce the self
And curb desire.
Lao Tzŭ's phrase for simplicity is nothing-wanting, which is neither an action nor a non-action but a state of being. And while he counsels against possession of people and things, he by no means counsels retreat from life and from other people in the guise of non-involvement and non- attachment. He counsels against self-involvement and self-attachment, and he decries anything that separates from the primal, anything that enlarges the self, anything that encourages the covetous. The counsel of nothing-wanting leads to simplicity whoever wants to get there.
No calamity is greater
Than not knowing what is enough,
No fault worse than wanting too much.
Whoever knows what is enough
Has enough.
How does a person know what is enough? Certainly he does not discover such a limit by himself, even though it can be found only within himself. Something outside makes the inward discovery for him, and that outside something may be custom or it may be Tao; Tao as Tao or Tao as whatever term shall be used to indicate the source of meaningfulness in life. In times when custom is sloughing off, it is not until a person turns to the Way that he can simplify his life. And it may well be that he turns to Tao only because his life is so meaningless that it has become unbearably complex.
Indeed, the complexities of contemporary life are the inseparable consequence of lost purpose and forgotten meaning. Many people act as if they wanted to be forlorn, frustrated, and forsaken, as if they wished to live surrounded by an atmosphere of distress. In literature there is a marked absence of purpose outside self, and there are no longer generally accepted codes of behavior; there is not a commonly accepted body of learning, not enough even for literary allusions. Other arts reflect rootlessness, and painting so rejects the ways of nature that it fragments space and the beings occupying it. It seems to make little difference whether a man goes to church or lies abed of Sundays; he suffers from an absence of significance, and his centeredness on self does not rescue him from a paralysis of purpose. He feels the dull ache of aloneness, the swirling vacuity of frustration; and some sense informs him that that he is beset with deadness.
The misery of this deadness is too suffocating to bear. Besides, it is productive of exhausting tensions and angers when one miserable person confronts another miserable person. It therefore becomes a desperate im- perative to find a way out of the deadness, and unless a true Way is found, it is easy to end up in one of a number of dead-end streets. Five of these dead-end escapes come at once to mind.
One escape is to cast off restraints on behavior in the conviction that, God having been overthrown, anything is permissible. Whether the anything is sex, success, or crime, it is made the occasion of sudden upsurges of excitement that reflect the hope that all life will be one long binge. Since life patently is no such picnic, this escape sooner or later closes up, usually sooner than later: it cannot survive the interruptions of daily existence or the interference of falling sick, getting old, and running short of money.
The second escape, probably the principal escape in the Bronze Age but not infrequent in an age of computers, is concentration on personal possessions and on the inward covetousness that spurs acquisition of them, leading to such common acts as addictive buying and compulsive self-decoration. This escape is a brittle one. "Do not," advises Lao Tzŭ," shine like jade or tinkle like stone chimes."
Hold onto fullness?
It is better to stop.
Handle sharp edges?
They can't long be kept.
When gold and jade fill
a house,No one can protect it.
Pride in wealth and fame
Breeds its own collapse.
In an age when there is little gold, not much jade, and no stone chimes, Lao Tzŭ’s advice is often extended to material objects in general. His advice actually pertains not to the objects but to preoccupation with them. Some earnest people believe that having anything more than blue jeans, brown rice, new wine, and no heat is an obstacle to Truth so great that a search for it cannot even be started. This convenient excuse is one sometimes offered by people of high education and low income, whose possessions are typically not material but personal, consisting of their offspring, their spouses, and the more mentionable of their friends. But they wear the people around them with as much eclat as the rich wear fur coats and rare-metal watches. This sort of escape begins to fail when the decorations begin to talk back.
A third escape is a falling back willy-nilly on precisely those conventionalities in which one was brought up, perhaps under the illusion that whatever produced such a person as oneself must be life's true guide, a guide to how children should be raised or the house cleaned or the thermostat set. The attractiveness of this escape is usually blocked by hurt feelings and hard feelings when people nearby decline to follow the true guide, even when particularly directed to follow it. Moreover, the guide tends to exacerbate hard feelings towards the very persons who created the guide. Hatred chains many people to their parents more tightly than does affection, but they still feel dead.
A fourth escape is by way of compulsions, including obvious addiction to alcohol and drugs, more subtle habituation to selected neuroses, and hidden fascinations and intoxications of a sub-clinical sort. The insidiousness of such escapes lies in the illusion that compulsive dedication to particular things, activities, rituals, and emotions will clarify fife out of confusion, simplify it out of complexity, and lift it out of inertness. A vain hope. People clamoring to be overawed by compulsions are usually overwhelmed by the inward racket they stir up, and the racket does not go away until the compulsion does. There is no chance of wanting nothing until an end is made of something-wanting. Wistful hopes for simplicity diminish as the complications of the addicted life increase.
Specific addiction to alcohol and drugs is recognized almost universally as a compulsive effort at escape, even though it often seems uncertain what is being escaped from. The victims of addiction themselves feel certain that they are escaping from something specific in the form of outside pressures and injustices, but the more they escape the more uncertain they are whether they are getting away from anything. Frustration ensues, and this mood can be changed only through more alcohol and drugs until all mood is obliterated in the vacancies of druggedness and drunkenness. For such addiction, the words of the Tao Teh Ching have a pertinence so obvious as to be amusing:
Knowing what is enough avoids disgrace;
Knowing when to stop secures from peril.
It is, of course, precisely the nature of compulsion that addicts are unable to know what or when to stop. They are powerless to get over their disease through any operation of their own minds and intelligence; the disease, indeed, has been called "self-will run riot." It is possible to recover from it by abandoning self-will along with the urge to know the why of addiction, a process undertaken in the mutual-aid groups of Alcoholics Anonymous whenever the addict becomes willing to surrender his will to that of a Power greater than himself, personified in the group, and to follow a new way of life. Will is traded in on recovery.
The compulsive character of the neuroses is self-evident to persons suffering from them, and these complaints have been successfully treated as if they were compulsions by encouraging surrender of self-will and discovery of a new way of life. But such treatment is new and relatively unknown. Only selected fears and cravings are usually named compulsive by psychotherapists. Treatment of the common conditions of fear, rage, depression, and guilt, together with the syndrome wherein all these conditions chase one another around in a circle, usually involves an un- derstanding of the illness and an analysis of its causes, combined with a will to overcome the irrational by the rational. Relatively few patients, however, are lifted out of their afflictions by these devices, and in most cases the benefits of psychotherapy are palliative, resulting largely, perhaps, from ventilation with a concerned therapist or group. The mental health industry is as conventional as other industries, and nothing-wanting and nothing-knowing are not part of the business.
When compulsion operates on lower-than-clinical levels, it is seldom recognized as compulsion or as anything anyone ought to get over, for it is seen as nothing more than the inordinate pursuit of things commonly considered good in themselves, such as work, housecleaning, education, churchgoing, bookreading, woodworking, picturemaking, concertgoing, and gift-getting. Actually, there is little difference between chasing these in-themselves goods and seeking more dubious escapes in the thrills and violences of television or the artificial emotionalisms of the movies. When the pursuit of anything at all, whether good or bad, involves dependency on it, that thing plays the same role as the more obvious compulsions: it is pursued because it hides reality. Compulsion is inwardly more destructive than the objects pursued. The practices of churches can be as destructive as the tantrums of households. Immersion in hard work can be as overwhelming as immersion in drink. Reading literature can be as heady as shooting drugs. Prayer can be turned into self-worship. Only the Way itself allows of inordinate pursuit; the inordinate pursuit of anything else ends in destruction. Even the good of society. When it becomes a compulsion, it is as destructive to chase after it as status and riches and fame; and it is doubly destructive to be clever about it:
When Tao is cast aside,
Duty and humanity abide.
When prudence and wit appear,
Great hypocrites are here.
The illusory pursuit of compulsions or possessions is typically accompanied by ritual: that is, by a ceremonious repetitiveness that aims to give irrationalities and egocentrisms the appearance, if not of righteousness, at least of style. It occupies a place far down on a descending scale of aberrations. ("When morality is lost, there is cere- mony. Now ceremony is the shell of loyalty and trust, and the beginning of confusion.") Even farther down the list is divination and the sundry forms of superstition:
As to foreknowledge,
It is a blossomy path
And the beginning of folly.
The notion that nature can be magically manipulated to further personal interests is foreign to the Tao Teh Ching. In view of the association of later Taoism with magic and foretelling and the occult in general, it is well to emphasize that the Taoism of Lao Tzu is not less iconoclastic than other prophetic faiths. The I Ching, a work now popular among Westerners, reflects a mixture of wisdom and divination that characterized the Chou dynasty during which Lao Tzu lived, but its conventionality and superstition are not Tao but what Tao is against.
What of the religion of personal health, perhaps the only ancient form of faith left in Europe and America? A system of belief replete with rules of diets, lists of exercises, precepts about good potions and bad potions, and prohibitions of self-harming practices, it is shunned by Lao Tzu with the same vigor he shuns any other form of preoccupation with self. The Tao Teh Ching, in a comment about interfering with creation, describes as injurious a practice that much later became a popular system of self-fitness and self-spirituality:
It is ominous to improve on life,
Injurious to control breathing by the mind:
Things overgrown fall into decay.
This is not Tao
And what is not Tao soon ends.
But, conversely, what is Tao never ends. Once the compulsions of something-doing, something-knowing, and something-wanting are cast aside, the Way opens. But that is the next chapter.
