Dao De Jing Quotes

Higher good is like water: the good in water benefits all, and does so without contention. It rests where people dislike to be, so it is close to the Way. Good ground; profound is the good in its heart, Benevolent the good it bestows.

Know the world from end to end is a mirror; in each atom a hundred suns are concealed. If you pierce the heart of a single drop of water, from it will flow a hundred clear oceans; if you look intently at each speck of dust, in it you will see a thousand beings. A gnat in its limbs is like an elephant; in name a drop of water resembles the Nile. In the heart of a barleycorn is stored a hundred harvests. Within a millet-seed a world exists. In an insects wing is an ocean of life. A heaven is concealed in the pupil of an eye. The core at the center of the heart is small, yet the Lord of both worlds will enter there.

For a student of life, there is perhaps no single better text—certainly of its length—than the Dao De Jing.

Like it or not, philosophy or intellectual activity in ancient China was distinguished from manual labor, and thus philosophical texts were not only political in nature (because they normally addressed the issue of good government and social order) but also “esoteric.” They were not meant to contribute to general education, but to be studied only by a small fraction of the population, i.e., by those who had access to learning and power. If we want to understand the Laozi historically, we have to accept this context and thus also the fact that, as a philosophical treatise, it did not attempt to be generally accessible. It was originally a text for the few—and it clearly shows.

It is simply in doing things noncoercively That everything is governed properly.

Knowing oneself strong but keeping oneself gentle is a brook under heaven.

In other words, we defer in attaining integrity with those things that contextualize us, establishing a frictionless equilibrium with them. And it is this state of achieved equilibrium that is precisely the relationship most conducive to symbiotic growth and productivity.

Habit is an acquired and cultivated disposition to act in one way as opposed to another. It is the significant form that bursts of energy take as they are channeled through existing patterns of associated living, dependent upon anticipated response as much as novel impulse.

Paradoxically, for the Daoist the objective world is objectless. Sages envision a world of changing events that they can, for whatever reason, choose to freeze momentarily into a distinct pattern of discrimination, but that they recognize, when they see clearly, as being beyond such distinctions.

Among other things, this chapter represents a valiant although self-consciously inadequate attempt to do what Wittgenstein says cannot be done. According to Wittgenstein, one cannot predicate the whole. That is, one cannot say that the totality of things is either large or small if there is nothing beyond it with which to compare.

Daoist naming personalizes a relationship and, abjuring any temptation to fix what is referenced, instead understands the name as a shared ground of growing intimacy. Such naming is presentational rather than just representational, normative rather than just descriptive, perlocutionary rather than just locutionary, a doing and a knowing rather than just a saying.

Naming as knowing must have the provisionality to accommodate engaged relationships as in their “doing and undergoing” they deepen and become increasingly robust. Such knowing is dependent upon an awareness of the indeterminate aspects of things. The ongoing shaping of experience requires a degree of imagination and creative projection that does not reference the world as it is, but anticipates what it might become.

The world around us is always an interface between persistent form and novelty, the familiar honeycombed by the unexpected. The new emerges within the context and the security of the ordinary, and in due course, what was new overtakes and supplants the ordinary, and what was ordinary becomes an increasingly fragile memory for those who can still remember. In time, the new becomes the newly ordinary, and the ordinary returns whence it came.

third assumption in the Daoist “cosmology” is that life broadly construed is entertained through and only through these same phenomena that constitute our experience. The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and flow.

There is one general point that we would make in our interpretation of this classical Chinese language. Above we have argued for a processual understanding of classical Daoist cosmology. If this account is persuasive, it means that the vocabulary that expresses the worldview and the common sense in which the Daodejing is to be located is first and foremost gerundive. Because “things” in the Daodejing are in fact active “processes” and ongoing “events,” nouns that would “objectify” this world are derived from and revert to a verbal sensibility.

The wu-forms that we find throughout the text all advocate a personal disposition that seeks to optimize relationships through collaborative actions that, in the absence of coercion, enable one to make the most of any situation. It is the uniqueness of each situation that requires any generalization about this optimal disposition to be stated in negative terms. A voice coach can describe the constraints that students in general might have to overcome in achieving the fullness of their talent, but all of the students must sing their own unique songs.

Several defining aspects of focal order condition our awareness of it. The first of these conditions is the temporal immediacy of the continuing present: order is always located in the “very now.” The second condition is spatial immediacy: order starts here and goes there. Third, focal order is always collaborative: all relations, while they are intrinsic and thus constitutive, are also projective and recursive. And finally, equilibrium in one’s disposition allows one to contextualize events on their own terms and to achieve an optimally productive harmony.

second assumption of Daoist “cosmology” (now using this term “cosmology” under advisement) that follows from this acknowledgment of the reality of both change and the uniqueness that follows from it is that particular “things” are in fact processual events, and are thus intrinsically related to the other “things” that provide them context. Said another way, these processual events are porous, flowing into each other in the ongoing transformations we call experience. Formation and function—the shape of things and what they do to whom—are interdependent and mutually determining characteristics of these events. It is for this reason that things resist “definition” in the literal sense of finis—a practice that delineates some ostensibly discrete boundary around them, and thus reduces all relations to external, extrinsic transactions. With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity for any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness.

What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms. The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, now unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day. It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

To use the word “habits” to characterize either the Confucian li or the Daoist ecological sensibility might seem, initially, somewhat disenchanting, reducing the intense and elegantly productive human experience, whether human-centered or more broadly construed, to the ordinary and routine. But the claim at issue is that it is precisely in the elevation of the routine and ordinary business of the day, rather than in some ephemeral and transitory “momentous” events, that the profound meanings of a life are to be realized. And, properly understood, “habit” is essential to this process of enchanting the everyday.

There is an object who has a homogeneous completion; she exists before the generation of heaven and earth; she is gorgeous and touching; she stands alone and has no boundary; she can be the mother of heaven and earth. I do not know her name and call her by the word—Dao. I name her forcibly and call her greatness. Greatness calls for prophecy; prophecy calls for distance; distance calls for introspection. The Dao is great; heaven is great; earth is great; a king is also great. So, there are four great things in a country; the king is one of them. People abide by earth; earth abides by heaven; heaven abides by the Dao; the Dao abides by herself.

Qigong Interpretation This chapter has pointed out a few important things about qigong practice. First, it has again emphasized the accumulation of good deeds and virtues. This will create in you a righteous, generous, peaceful, harmonious, and benevolent mind. Second, it mentions that the key of keeping the qi at its residence (or center) is embracing singularity. This means to keep your mind at the lower real dan tian (center of gravity). When keeping the mind at the center, your mind is not actively leading the qi out of its residence. This practice is called “keep at singularity” (shou yi, 守一), “embracing singularity” (bao yi, 抱一), or “hold and firm” (wo gu, 握固).

In our introduction to Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosophical Interpretation of the Zhongyong, we invoked Whitehead’s Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary to challenge the wisdom and accuracy of proposing “one-for-one” equivalencies in translating terms from one language to another. We introduce the notion of “linguistic clustering” as an alternative strategy to “literal translation” that allows us to put the semantic value of a term first by parsing its range of meaning according to context, with the assumption that a range of meaning with a different configuration of emphasis is present on each appearance of the term. The semantic value of a term and its subtle nuances of meaning are a product of its specific linguistic context.

Power is to be construed as the production of intended effects determined by external causation. Real creativity, on the other hand, entails the spontaneous production of novelty, irreducible through causal analysis. Power is exercised with respect to and over others. Creativity is always reflexive and is exercised over and with respect to “self.” And since self in a processive world is always communal, creativity is contextual, transactional, and multidimensional. Thus creativity is both self-creativity and co-creativity. Either everything shares in creativity, or there is no creativity. Indeed, it is this transactional, co-creative character of all creative processes that precludes the project of self-cultivation and self-creation from being egoistic.

In the Classic of Mountain and Seas, an ancient “gazetteer” that takes its reader on a field seminar through unfamiliar lands, the calls of the curious animals and birds that are encountered are in fact their own names. They (like most things) cry out what they would be. And having access to the “name” of something is not only a claim to knowing it in a cognitive sense, but more importantly, to knowing how to deal with it. Naming is most importantly the responsiveness that attends familiarity. Hence such knowing is a feeling and a doing: it is value-added. It is naming without the kind of fixed reference that allows one to “master” something, a naming that does not arrest or control. It is a discriminating naming that in fact appreciates rather than depreciates a situation.

). In fact, in the absence of some claim to objectivity that “objectifies” and thus makes “objects” of phenomena, the Chinese tradition does not have the separation between time and entities that would allow for either time without entities, or entities without time—there is no possibility of either an empty temporal corridor or an eternal anything (in the sense of being timeless). What encourages us within a Western metaphysical tradition to separate time and space is our inclination, inherited from the Greeks, to see things in the world as fixed in their formal aspect, and thus as bounded and limited. If instead of giving ontological privilege to the formal aspect of phenomena, we were to regard them as having parity in their formal and changing aspects, we might be more like classical China in temporalizing them in light of their ceaseless transformation, and conceive of them more as “events” than as “things.” In this processual worldview, each phenomenon is some unique current or impulse within a temporal flow. In fact, it is the pervasive and collective capacity of the events of the world to transform continuously that is the actual meaning of time. A

Immediate experience requires that the concrete particulars themselves are the objects of knowledge. Such particulars are not mediated but are grasped immediately in the sense that the experience of them is simply had. The structures that permit the having of experience and that determine its significance are the cultivated habits that dispose one toward that experience. The language of taste and of appreciation is relevant. The notion of Being that implies a contrast between essence and existence privileges mediation and, therefore, conceptual, generic, and essential knowledge. An aesthetic perspective, as opposed to a rational or logical one, involves experiencing the world in a relatively unmediated fashion. Mediated experience requires one to grasp or comprehend the essence of a thing, while the unmediated aesthetic experience is simply had as lived experience. A comparison with the analytical epistemic language of “getting,” “grasping,” “comprehending” is important here. Rather than a language of mediation in which the essences of things are abstracted through concepts, the Chinese language tends to be dispositional in that it promotes the “having” of the unmediated experience through a correlating and focusing of the affairs of the day. The important contrast here is between a cognitive and discursive knowing that abstracts from experience and felt experience as the concrete content of knowledge.

In Laozi’s original, this verse begins: From one comes two, and this makes three, and thus ten thousand come to be. What do these numbers refer to? How should one interpret them? I base my interpretation on a line from the Great Commentary on the Yijing and another from Richard Wilhelm’s commentary to his 1910 translation of the Dao De Jing. One yin, one yang: this is Dao. (Great Commentary on the Yijing) By the coming forth of the One the Two is created; by the two joining the One the Three comes about. (Richard Wilhelm, p 73) These are the three terms: Dao, yin and yang. One is Dao, the single presence. Two are yin and yang, the complementary aspects of Dao. Three is the sum, the whole. Laozi goes on to locate yin and yang in our direct experience. Just what is the Dao? It is yin on my shoulders And yang in my arms. The three terms Dao, yin and yang are not metaphysical terms. They are not mere words or names. They are concrete, physical, and visible. You can literally point to them with a finger. To look in at the yin, point your finger to your own faceless awareness. To look out at the yang, point your finger to the world of appearances directly in front of you. See that nothing separates this yin and yang. They are two views of your presence, you life in the moment, two views of Dao. Can you see both ways and harmonize and balance the two views? It’s the Way to wholeness. 43.

A. Pour coopérer avec le ciel dans le gouvernement des hommes, l’essentiel c’est de tempérer son action. B. Cette modération doit être le premier souci. Elle procure l’efficacité parfaite, laquelle réussit à tout, même à gouverner l’empire. C. Qui possède cette mère de l’empire (sage modération), durera longtemps. Elle est ce qu’on a appelé la racine pivotante, le tronc solide. Elle est le principe de la perpétuité.

A. Si le ciel et la terre durent toujours, c’est qu’ils ne vivent pas pour eux-mêmes. B. Suivant cet exemple, le Sage, en reculant, s’avance ; en se négligeant, il se conserve. Comme il ne cherche pas son avantage, tout tourne à son avantage. Résumé des commentaires. Si le ciel et la terre durent toujours, ne sont pas détruits par des jaloux, des envieux, des ennemis, c’est qu’ils vivent pour tous les êtres, faisant du bien à tous. S’ils cherchaient leur propre intérêt, dit Wang-pi, ils seraient en conflit avec tous les êtres, un intérêt particulier étant toujours l’ennemi de l’intérêt général. Mais, comme ils sont parfaitement désintéressés, tous les êtres affluent vers eux. — De même, si le Sage cherchait son propre intérêt, il n’aurait que des ennuis, et ne réussirait à rien. S’il est désintéressé à l’instar du ciel et de la terre, il n’aura que des amis, et réussira en tout. — Pour arriver à durer, il faut s’oublier, dit Tchang-houng-yang. Le ciel et la terre ne pensent pas à soi, aussi rien de plus durable. Si le Sage est sans amour propre, sa personne durera et ses entreprises réussiront. Sinon, il en sera tout autrement. — Ou-teng rappelle, et avec raison, que, par ciel et terre, il faut entendre le Principe agissant par le ciel et la terre. C’est donc le désintéressement du Principe, qui est proposé en exemple au Sage, dans ce chapitre.