The Nature of Things

I wrote an excursion into Christianity and a talk with an apostle, plus what the purpose of religion is (and also some other stuff), but it was long and off-topic, so I'm linking to it here because there was a somewhat causal link at first and you might say they're peas in a pod. You can keep reading instead for a talk with the author of the following passage. Or do both.

If you can talk about it,
it ain't Tao.
If it has a name,
it's just another thing.

Tao doesn't have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what's real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things.

These two statements have the same meaning.
Figure them out, and you've got it made.

I always approve of down-to-earth translation (although I also completely approve of poetry and think that most things in the KJV sound better than their equivalents in the vernacular of today, albeit that one shouldn't read the KJV as anything but poetry, really) and this one struck me.  As many things on the Internet, it's unattributed (but please let me know where it's from so I can buy the rest).

The thing about translations of Chinese, and the Dao De Jing (or the Tao Te Ching; I'm Pinyin-Wade-Giles agnostic here) is that you can basically take the task of translating the Bible (yes, that English Bible that you've read wasn't originally written in English, and I don't mean to be condescending here but people really do think that) and multiply by some number greater than one. It's hard.  The characters don't mean letters, they mean words, and the nuance of the words is difficult to capture in translation.  Plus, the Dao is pretty vague.  If you've ever read some of the Dao, you know that... well, the Dao that can be read is not the eternal Dao.  Sorry, little Daoism joke there.

The Buddha said that the cause of suffering is desire. The Dao De Jing says that desiring named things causes one to lose touch with the real, the true, that Dao that cannot be named or expressed.  The "suffering" of Buddhism is not just stubbing your toe or being sad. It's existential. It's a disconnect with the truth, or an inability to cope with change. The Dao says everything is always changing, and nothing you can name or try to make concrete is real. "Stop naming things!" says Lao Tzu (or Laozi, but not as familiarly to Western audiences) in our straight-talk above. But he's also saying, "Stop trying to hold on to things." Stop trying to keep things from changing. Stop with the desire.

But Lao Tzu (who exists for the purposes of attribution)... well, you can guess that I had a chat with him, and once we bridged the mutual-incomprehensibility divide, he had some things to say. Li Bai recommended a rice-wine bar, but Lao (he insisted we be on first name terms because he's given up family names and honorifics) just dragged me to the tea house (he's surprisingly sprightly for his age) and we discussed this and that over tea, which was excellent and probably a better choice than rice wine would have been anyway. Edited highlights, because he also talked about the rest of the book.

"Dao is the way. Not like Jesus, but like him as well. Not like the Buddhist Path, and yet like that too. Dao is the way you can't follow. I still can't. I was telling you that you can't follow it because if you try and you can, it's not Dao. Cannot count the number of minds I've completely blown with shit like that. The Zen cats made a whole religion of nothing but shit like that.

"So you're wondering what the point of it is if you can't do it. Change is fact, dig. I dig on the I Ching as well, you know, although I didn't write it. I don't think anyone did. It's just accretion. Probably started out as some cat getting drunk and just grooving. But none of that's in what you've got now. Maybe everyone wrote it. Pretty mind-blowing to think about.

"Change. But what I was driving at was that you cats are too literal. You're too about rules that have to be handed down from who knows when by who knows who, just like the I Ching. Except the I Ching is always changing, but religions and their rules, they don't change because tradition blah blah blah. You're reading books that are older than me and saying they didn't change. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those books, but you can't follow them because they're things, dig?

"Dao ain't a thing, like I said. Go around looking for things and you're gonna wind up bluesville, baby. Lots of cats think they're all that, have all the things ever, but like Dylan said, you know, times are a-changing. I dig on that, you feel me?"

We'll probably hear from Lao again, but for right now, the central point I'd like to make is that sometimes we're too hidebound to beliefs and traditions. Certainly, as humans it's difficult to live in a constant state of flux, and tradition is a powerful thing, sometimes worthy of preservation for no reason other than that it connects us with those who came before us. When change conflicts with tradition, we must examine both.

Belief doesn't need to be set in stone. One can believe in God without believing that one knows every aspect of God, that one's picture of God is the true and only. I'm not just speaking to fundamentalists here; we all have things we "know" to be true which we never consider in the light of new situations.

What does it serve to have a belief that is never tested? Is that a belief, or a blinder? Change happens, and sometimes we hold fast because the change will swing back around, and sometimes we should let go of our beliefs and allow them to be reshaped to get closer to the eternal ideal. But if there's one thing that everyone should take away from this homily, it's that the eternal ideal isn't achievable. The way that can be named, seen, experienced, traveled, is not The Way, capital letters, full stop.

If you name the path, if you mark the path, if you even believe yourself to be on the path, you're missing the point. You can't refine your definition of truth until it becomes true. You can't define truth so specifically that it is always true. Truth is bigger than that. Goodness, faith, love, God, whatever it might be, is bigger than that.

There's more to the Dao than that, but that's what I wanted to take away from this. Stop being inflexible. Stop believing you know what's up, because you don't. Stop trying to tie everything down, because all you're tying down is yourself. Sometimes, there's a truth that's bigger than rules. Sometimes, just because it says so in a book, it ain't so. We're all lost in darkness, searching for the light, but it's the light that matters, not its direction or distance, not the path we take or how often we have to turn along the way.

But in the end, all of that is the dao that can be named. And that ain't The Dao.