If a country is governed with tolerance,
the people are comfortable and honest.
If a country is governed with repression,
the people are depressed and crafty.
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Layer upon layer
She finds deep in her own experience the central truths of the art of living, which are paradoxical only on the surface: that the more truly solitary we are, the more compassionate we can be; the more we let go of what we love, the more present our love becomes; the clearer our insight into what is beyond good and evil, the more we can embody the good. Until finally she is able to say, in all humility, "I am the Tao, the Truth, the Life." S. Mitchell
Translation of the Tao Te Ching by Stephen Mitchell, Harper & Row, 1988. In keeping with copyright law only the chapter under study is fulltext. All other chapters show only the first stanza.
Study Group Contac: Lissa Lord:lissalord@gmail.com
Tao in WordLayers
Layer upon layer
A translation I like very much is by the Scottish poet, Charles A. Mackintosh (originally published in 1926 by the Theosophical Society in America). Here, Mackintosh presents the Tao as one unbroken whole—a poetic version that reads beginning to end in numbered verse. I have marked my copy of Mackintosh with chapter numbers. Chapter 58 seems to run from verse 202 - 206, and is one of the sweetest grouping of words I have read in any Tao translation.
ReplyDelete204
Thus everything in life depends
Upon its own reverse;
As enemies depend on friends,
And prose depends on verse.
205
And good on bad, as bad on good;
As courage rests on fear;
Only the rash and reckless could
Presume to interfere.
The day I read the above was a day I awoke in a nightmare, and an undefined fear stuck like glue even as I poured a sound cup of coffee. Truth sometimes appears smack in the middle of insignificant thought, as "courage rests on fear" did for me. So, I had fear and I lived the day, anyway. I do not think this an unusual human phenomenon. It seems that life is a series of jumbled incidents that may make sense at the end of day like "prose depends on verse."