I’d like to begin by telling you a bit of my origin story.
When I decided to memorize the Tao Te Ching, I knew it wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be easy because memorizing roughly 5000 words isn’t the kind of thing you just wake up one day and accomplish before going to bed.
It was going to take time, and the time had to be spent strategically.
I figured, these are short chapters. None of them are longer than 1 page. I can do 1 chapter every other day. That’s 162 days to memorize 81 chapters.
But, it will be a cumulative process. Learning chapter 2 is my opportunity to practice chapter 1. Learning chapter 3 is my chance to review both 1 and 2, and so on.
Would you like to know how I memorized the chapters? I would put the text in front of me, read a line out loud, avert my eyes from the page, and say the words I’d just read, 10 times.
I’m sure you can guess what I did next: repeated the process one line at a time, cumulatively, so that by the time I got to the last line, I was saying the entire chapter from memory in one sitting.
You know what’s remarkable about this approach? The efficiency. I didn’t time myself, but I would bet you anything it took no more than 15 minutes to learn an entire chapter in this way.
And then less than 1 minute to review.
As time went by, my brain became more and more accustomed to the process and to the material. I started to notice the patterns of how ideas were organized, developed, and repeated with variation. I began to understand the mind of Lao Tzu, and the mind of Gia Fu Feng, who translated his ideas into English.
I would review and solidify the material on the bus, at the gym, during walks, or at the beginning and end of the day, like a kind of meditation. I would see the way certain events, or thoughts in my mind, were almost answered by specific lines in the text.
I was living and breathing the Tao Te Ching every day, and it became the undercurrent of thought persisting throughout the continuous changes of daily activity.
I would navigate a busy street in Chinatown, and think, “yield and overcome.” Someone would be rude to me and I would think, “accept being unimportant,” or “he who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people is fit to rule them.” I would feel angry at someone and suddenly think “he who is self righteous is not respected.”
And so on. The words of Lao Tzu became like a toolkit into which I could reach at the moment of frustration, the moment my egotism, my vanity, my arrogance, my pettiness, my invented feelings of victimhood, my cruelty, or my vindictive sadism reared its ugly, insistent head, like a panting dog with halitosis.
I hammered in the words of the great sage with daily, hourly repetition, until the temple of wisdom could stand firm against the buffeting storm of my folly.
I am telling you now, there was much folly to be undone. I would read or recall the chapters and would quite often be moved to tears – by finally coming to grips with the extent of my error. Errors of perception, errors of effort, errors of abandonment.
But these were tears of relief, not sadness. The relief of finally seeing the self inflicted pain come to an end. To receive, into arms finally opened by fate and its deftly dealt blows, the knowledge of how to live and what to do.
With all of that in view, I would like to walk you through chapter 4, and share what I believe to be its true meaning, or, to say it better, the meaning that feels most meaningful to me.
I’ll reprint it first, and then comment. Are you with me?
Chapter 4
The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
Blunt the sharpness,
Untangle the knot,
Soften the glare,
Merge with dust.
Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence it comes.
It is the forefather of the emperors.
If you really want to see those words through my eyes, you can memorize them right now using the method I described above.
1 line at a time, 10 times each, cumulatively. What will you begin to see in yourself and the world, for the very first time, if you give these words and ideas the keys to every room of your mind?
Let’s find out.
The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
The language of the Tao Te Ching is poetic, and appeals to our intuition. I wouldn’t call it illogical, but nonlogical: it overcomes the demand for systematic consistency with the agility of metaphor, and by enlisting our imaginations.
Only you can explain this to yourself, the same way I had to wrap my mind around it all by myself.
The way of the world, the Tao, is the way of instantaneous invention, use, and abandonment of method. It is used but never filled. It never hardens into sediment.
The vessel is always empty: whatever it is that is needed now, the entirety of the vessel, the entirety of The Way, is available to receive it.
What is filling your vessel now? What is it that can’t enter because of what was never poured out from the past?
Lessons of today pour in, but they find a full glass, and water spills.
This messy absentmindedness is not the way. The way is the use without filling. Take the shape of this moment, but lose it instantly to take the shape of the moment that is already arising.
You think of yourself as something – a lawyer, a musician, a peacemaker, a liberal, a loving sister – what will you do when the moment calls for something that falls outside of the definitions you permit yourself?
I only need to be a guitarist when a guitar is in my hands. When the page is before me, a writer. When I go to bed with my lady, a lover. And so on. People want to be friends with a musician, a writer, a lover, a cook, an administrator, only if that person knows how to set all those things aside and be a friend when the friend is before them.
To have depth is to have a deep vessel that is nonetheless emptied at a moment’s notice, leaving only the deeply reverberating echoes of everything you’ve become at the behest of untold moments.
A word of warning – nothing you claim to be can ever excuse the refusal to become what is demanded of you now. “The Tao…is never filled.”
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
The Sage does not claim to know what he does not know, what cannot be known. He does not know the secret origins of the universe, or how the world came to be as it is. He only knows that it is the way that it is. But do you know that much? The Sage does not necessarily have more information than you: in many cases you can be certain that you know more.
And, maybe this is the problem. When I think I know, my vessel is full – when I act, I empty it. Now the mysterious world goes to work with my offering of action, bringing forth an elaboration of itself as an answer. I discover that what I knew, even if completely correct, is always dwarfed by what I don’t.
No matter what I do,
or learn,
or say,
or think,
the flow of reality,
from one moment to the next,
the unfathomable source of ten thousand things,
keeps producing,
endlessly inventive,
never tiring.
I can only keep up by emptying my vessel over and over and over.
Blunt the sharpness,
Untangle the knot,
Soften the glare,
Merge with dust.
Why do we take it too far, you and I? Why do we dig in our heels, and harden into something unyielding and oppositional, judgmental, harsh, and punishing, or, on the other hand, into something evasive, flippant, dismissive, minimizing, and superficial?
Because our vessels are full. The vessel gets full and stays full, and flexibility disappears. To empty the vessel, to drop the rigid ideas of identity that we form as necessary responses to each moment, is to blunt the sharpness, untangle the knot, soften the glare, and merge with dust.
Stay in an idea of self long enough and it becomes too sharp to handle, too tight to budge, too bright to confront directly, too high and mighty.
Said another way, the waves are crushing you because you refuse to flow with them – you refuse to bend when life demands bending. Life is the stronger force. Life will break you, quickly and effortlessly, if you resist.
The folly of man, of you and me both, is in thinking our oppositional hardness has any real power.
Merge with dust: reconcile yourself to that which you are so sure is beneath your dignity, by which you feel insulted, or what you can’t be bothered to engage with.
And by this I simply mean: do what needs to be done, and do not let your pride, or your vain attempts to conceal your inadequacies, stop you.
Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence it comes.
It is the forefather of the emperors.
I don’t know about you, but I love that line: hidden deep but ever present.
Both right here and out of reach, at the same time, at all times. I have a way of expressing this that I hope you’ll enjoy. I think it’s quite poetic, if I do say so: stop looking for it, and start looking at it.
If I told you to go find it, you would never be sure. And you would never find it. Because searching from place to place cannot be the way we find what is ever present.
If it is hidden deeply, look deeply.
I would repeat this line to myself over and over, oh hidden deep but ever present, as I went about my day. At work, in transit, in rehearsal, everywhere. It is here now. The great and final secret is in the room now, here with you now, has never been anywhere else but here. It was here then just as it is here now. Hidden deep but ever present. Always available, never gone, never withheld, never taken off the table, never something that does not apply – it admits no exceptions, and this is the ultimate humility: every moment spent without it is a moment I fail to look at it.
What happens to the conversation when you won’t make eye contact? This is what happens to you and the Tao, you and the way, when you refuse to look. It is humbling to look – because you can only see it by emptying the vessel. Emptying the vessel always means self abnegation: who I am is already who I was, I must now make room for what I might become.
I know this means something special for you, something it could never mean for me. You have your own private treasure of wisdom all to yourself in these words.
Empty yourself that you might receive it.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.
Jas
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