Tao te Ching

Power for the Peaceful

Lao Tzu

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506469867
• eBook ISBN: 9781506469874
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Although translations and interpretations of the Tao te Ching abound and new editions are released yearly, few accomplish the hard work of linking and bridging the Tao's profound message to the needs of modern readers. There may be a profusion of versions, but our lives and our world reflect little of the deep, transformative potential of this important text.

Marc S. Mullinax's new translation grows from extensive teaching experience and combines a deep understanding of the Tao's fourth-century BCE Chinese context with an exciting two-part application of that text to contemporary life.

First, each of the eighty-one verses is joined by a richly curated array of quotes, sayings, poems, and stories from wisdom traditions around the globe. With quotes ranging from Emerson to Pink Floyd, and from the apostle Paul to Margaret Atwood, the Tao's meaning comes alive in conversation with others.

Second, a brief reflection puts the verse in historical context and highlights the transformative power of Wu-Wei, the "non-interfering action, perfectly timed, to promote peace and prevent injury, " to bring joy and justice to a hurting world.

Tao Te Ching

Power for the Peaceful

The Taoteching is one long poem written in praise of something we cannot name, much less imagine.

—Red Pine, introduction to Lao Tzu’s Taoteching

Afterword

[Gandalf] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Tao is the Way; the way to live is Tao. Seen one way, It is the most difficult of roads to find and follow; seen in another light, It is logical, natural, and easy because Tao is everywhere. There is no place one can be and be without or apart from It.

Tao constitutes the deepest and oldest knowledge tradition of China, and It has aged well. It invites people still to a spiritual assessment of their life and times and to a transformational pilgrimage through them.

If one pays attention to only a popular sense of Wu-wei, one can get the notion that this pilgrimage will be an easy road of “not doing.” And it can be for a few. However, for most of us, deeply enmeshed as we are in the entangling alliances of ego and competition, and the uncertainties of this age, the call of Tao is difficult to hear and more difficult to follow. Its path requires full-on commitment—no vacations—and is rewarding only after great perseverance. Tao’s path of Wu-wei leads to reverse action, reverse-engineering, inverse thinking, and inviting our world to re-verse its mad narratives. This is not easy. Still, we must plant seeds, and tend them with diligence until harvest.

“Your longest journey needs your first step” (Verse 64). On this long and sometimes lonely path, trust that you will meet companions along the way.

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Tao’s Way

I Any track one can walk is no path for the eternal Way. Any name one might borrow for Tao cannot summon It; names are just sounds for ordinary things.

II Before paths or words, Tao began all there is, but to start the naming—trying to tame It—begins a never-ending logorrhea powered by ego and desire, leading one astray.

III Not-desiring is the only way to glimpse this mystery. Desiring, all one sees are husks and appearances.

IV But both desiring and not-desiring are twins birthed in the same darkened mystery: through this dark lies the path to all wisdom. This is Tao’s style.

The best things can’t be told, the second best are misunderstood.

Heinrich Zimmer

I do not know it . . . it is without name . . . it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary or utterance of symbol.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure.

Deuteronomy 4:15–16

To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me, as though we were alike?

Isaiah 46:5

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8–9

Part of her had been diminished by being named.

Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast

Do not seek God’s name, for you will not find it. Everything with a name is named by someone stronger, so that one might call and the other obey. Who then has named God? “God” is not God’s name, but an opinion about God.

Sextus

Notes and Reflections

The Chinese text contains about five thousand characters, but every one is but commentary after these first fifty-nine. So we start with this mystery: In the beginning is the silence. Tao needs no language to do Its work, for Its syntax is silence. We discover Its work in unregistered fluencies. About which we cannot know, practice silence. While speaking, one can hear little. Language is not simple enough for Tao; therefore, It is expressed best unclothed with interfering words. In this verse, we are asked to trust and to listen, not to control by defining. Have we ever been able to trust and control at the same time? To “enword” Tao is to begin the gravest of partisan attempts to bring rational understanding (control) to Tao—a task as impossible as it is foolish. The reason we might give name or voice to Tao is that we do not listen. To give a voice is to give but one name, out of a multitude of names, to that without name. When that one name becomes the name, the only name, a fundamentalism begins. Much better to practice silence about what cannot be known with certainty than to speak and declare an ignorance that can turn into a certainty.

Tao has no proprietary language of Its own. Therefore, to speak about It, one must borrow language that is incapable of knowing or situating Tao. Thus all description about Tao has to pretend correctness and concreteness—wink, wink. Fundamentalist ways do not understand this wink. Tao’s style is inscrutable, and all we are left with is an urge to show the Way with “the best possible failure.” All languages suggest but fail to deliver on their suggestions: the word fire does not warm or burn a thing. Language’s power is suggestive, never certain.

What to do with all this suggestive power? Practice silence, which carries its own delicate eloquence. Remain sensitive to Tao by paying wordless attention to the ordinary course of things. Moses, in Exodus, confronted—barefoot—his god. He asked for the divine name, but all he got was an indefinite “I am who I am . . . I will be what I will be.”9 However, Moses took this imprecise definition and created a liberation and religious movement. Those with ears would do well to listen.

So what is Tao’s “sound,” if not human sputtering? Bees humming about the garden. The brilliance of flowers. Colors of autumn. The soundscape of the forest. The water’s drip-drip-drip bringing inevitable change in hard places. The pain cries of a birthing mother and her baby’s first mewl. Even cries of lament or feet marching for justice are Tao’s sounds. Whatever voices arise from the Earth, and however they are accented, are Tao’s sounds. They are Its creeds, Its confessions, and we may learn their fluencies. With no language-sound or visible path, Tao is discovered in the word-silence, just by walking along the Way Itself.

Finally, in the words all there is in the Chinese text is the oft-used phrase (used twenty times in the entire Tao Te Ching text) for “the ten thousand things” (萬 物). It is a Chinese way to point to awareness of the infinite number of things. Others translate this phrase as “the created order” or “all things under Heaven”: attempts to distinguish the innumerable manifestations of Nature from the singleness or unity of Tao.

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Distinctions Promote Contention

I Everyone knows how our discriminative minds frame things in pairs that seem interdependent. Awareness of the beautiful leads one to fra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Pragmatic Tao
• Tao Te Ching: Power for the Peaceful
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author/Translator