Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.
What do you mean by “Accept disgrace willingly”?
Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss or gain.
This is called “accepting disgrace willingly.”
What do you mean by “Accept misfortune as the human condition”?
Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 13. Translated Gia-Fu Feng 1972
Just reading it over from top to bottom once already gives you the second layer. Imagining the unsure student, he interjects, twice, “what do you mean by that,” and then clarifies himself. His clarifications are as blunt as the initial statements. I will go through each line in detail, but the device used here, which is the making of an impossible demand and reinforcing it without admission of hyperbole, is something to note right away: he means what he says!
Accept disgrace willingly. What exactly is meant by “disgrace?” It is initially distinguished from “misfortune.” He clarifies disgrace by speaking of one’s relative position in a social hierarchy, and clarifies misfortune as a natural consequence of having a body – an inevitability like sickness, old age and death.
There is so much in these words to wrestle with, and I think it is obvious that Lao Tzu fully expects us to do so. If you eagerly nod along, agreeing readily – yes, yes, kill the ego! – you may not have understood the assignment. Disgrace is painful. Being minimized, put in one’s place, and suffering the vicissitudes of fortune – nothing is easy about any of this. I love that he invites us to entertain the hope that his true meaning isn’t as stark as it initially seems by dangling “what do you mean by ‘accept disgrace willingly’?”, and that he immediately follows it with “accept being unimportant.” And then another hammering: “do not be concerned with loss or gain.” And then something like a final harumph or bah humbug: “this is called ‘accepting disgrace willingly.” This is a real dressing down. Nothing held back. Your expectations for yourself are to be entirely reevaluated and tempered, and there is no wiggle room about it. Of course, there is good news, but it comes later, and we are not there yet!
Accept being unimportant. I don’t know about you, but I very much want to matter. It feels good to go to work and feel like I belong there, that I’m respected, that people are happy to see me, and that what I’m about to spend the next several hours doing has some relevance to both my colleagues and customers. I also expect to be fairly and systematically compensated for every moment I spend working and for every output I generate. I want to matter to my friends and family too, and even more so. I think I can endure a lot of what I contend with at work because I matter to the people at home.
And then Lao Tzu commands me to accept being unimportant and to be unconcerned with loss or gain. Some part of me is already offended. Don’t you know I’ve got to make it? That I’ve got to increase my productive capacity, earn more, save more, invest more, and climb higher and higher year after year until I can fulfill every expectation I have of myself that others surely have of me too? Don’t I have to crack the code and become the maximally successful version of myself, or else I’ve squandered my life?
Accept being unimportant. Do not be concerned with loss or gain. He doesn’t say “don’t work so hard” or “don’t do your best” or anything like that. I think what these frigid words are really meant to do is prepare me for the inevitable feeling that no matter what I do there will be ups and downs. Gains, yes, but losses of many different kinds. I might earn some level of esteem in a profession, in a community, and within my own family, but I am never going to be another’s highest priority. People are self interested the way I am self interested. Ironically, if I take myself seriously and this is an intrinsic aspect of myself, it guarantees that this will to importance will always be met with frustration: every person from whom I want respect and acknowledgement is somehow busy with something important to himself or herself the moment I need to feel important. And to make matters worse, it doesn’t really help when it’s offered freely: it needs to be there when I come looking for it.
Lao Tzu would recommend that I do not come looking for it at all. To not think much of it when it is displayed, and even less when it is absent. Accept being unimportant.
I think there is something beyond merely accepting it, and that is a kind of relief. Would you not be relieved to know you are the furthest thing from the mind of an IRS auditor? From someone working in parking enforcement? An injured zebra would be happy to know his name has never been circulated in a committee of vultures. But we will have a robust discussion of what the acceptance of unimportance is really about, in the context of this chapter, once every line has been clarified.
This is called “accepting disgrace willingly.” I love the feeling of a punctuation mark left by this line. I say something. I follow it up with a question: do I mean by what I just said? And then I say: it means this. And also that. And then I conclude: that is what is meant by what I said. Lao Tzu may be subtle and nuanced, elusive and even intentionally evasive at times, but he is not wishy-washy and unsure. Everything he says has been duly considered, the object of a great lucubration, and handed down with confidence.
What do you mean by “Accept misfortune as the human condition”?
Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?
To my ear, there is a slight softening here compared to the opening gambit. In the first section we get firm commands: accept being unimportant. Do not be concerned with loss or gain. Now, we get something like a shoulder shrug: misfortune comes from having a body. Without a body, how could there be misfortune? First reprimanding, and now commiserating. From “this is what you must do,” to “what can anyone do?” This is an inversion of the technique he often uses, which is to take something familiar and follow it up with something more demanding or esoteric. The previous chapter was an example of the more common method: linking overstimulation to blindness and deafness, and then inviting us to consider that success and wealth can lead to something analogous to disability in exactly the same way.
It is also worth considering the statement itself: merely existing is the precondition for misfortune. Without a body, how could there be misfortune? I have said before that I simply will not get into a linguistic morass by asking myself where Lao Tzu ends and Gia-Fu Feng begins. I am not a scholar of ancient Chinese, and, more to the point, I want to speak from a position of maximal intellectual charity to Gia-Fu Feng: I assume he is conveying something of the true essence of the text, in the same way that I believe I see and even live in the essence of his translation. The lines of the Tao, as conveyed to me in English by his text, have been a kind of existential harbor to me over many years, and through many storms, the duration and severity of which are beyond the scope of these essays. The exact, idiosyncratic, and obviously inventive rather than literal words of Gia-Fu Feng occasioned a kind of thinking in me that restored my basic moral fitness. It restored my conscience and my reason. Without a body, how could there be misfortune? It is by trying to imagine this, that you “get it.” You stop fantasizing about impossible, utopian outcomes for your life and realize that you are a real thing in a real world and could not possibly be the very first exception to the rules. The rules that cut down the greatest individuals of history and the nameless masses alike: you alone are to be spared, now, because you occupy an entirely unique and extreme stratum of specialness. Misfortune comes from having a body. What is of course implied but not dwelt upon is that if you want to live at all, you have to accept the certainty of dying, but by uncertain means and timing.
Before we get to the closing lines, we should take what is so undeniable about the second stanza and carry it back to the first. Perhaps my expectations of importance are as reasonable as my expectations of bodily immortality. Perhaps my expectations of undisturbed material progress are equally silly and unserious. Again, something not dwelt upon or explicated but nonetheless necessarily implied: it is not said anywhere that I should not find pain painful, but rather that I am not entirely entitled to find the painful conditions frustrating. To be frustrated is to believe that what is happening should not be happening at all, and that it is an unwelcome interruption to What Should Be. When we don’t get our way, when we take a hit financially, or receive a windfall or a breakthrough or some high praise and public recognition for our accomplishments, Lao Tzu says you should not be concerned.
We might dwell on this word “unconcerned” for a moment. It is a common mistake to confuse acceptance with passive resignation. I have to accept that something is happening before I can take action in a timely manner. I have to accept that my efforts or strategy are insufficient or ineffective before I can make the necessary improvements. Acceptance does not mean inaction, but is rather and always the precondition for action. In the same way, being unconcerned cannot mean entirely inattentive. There is an appropriate and even wise response to all gains or losses, and what stands in the way of you giving that response is preoccupation with the self, with how you think you appear to others. This can be easily reasoned through. Suppose you don’t know what to do at all. You at least know that right away. You open a drawer in the desk of the toolshed of your mind and find it empty – what happens then? Do you seek advice? Do you review and study? In the moment it happens, do you know how to handle yourself gracefully and undefensively? There is perhaps no better measure of your sense of self importance than your willingness to seek the instruction of another after an encounter with your own ignorance. Ironically, if you are unwilling to look foolish by admitting you don’t know something, you’ll never embrace the earnest studiousness necessary to become someone whose knowledge might impress someone whose opinion matters to you. And this is really the whole point: excessive preoccupation with one’s standing is a self-defeating position, precisely because it paralyzes you and renders you incapable of taking the necessary actions that might preserve or elevate it. Again, acceptance is a precondition for action, and pretense is always an obstacle to it. To be unconcerned means to simply respond appropriately and practically to whatever comes your way, in any area of your life.
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.
This always stops me in my tracks. On its own the stanza is breathtaking and profound, and worthy of daily repetition and contemplation. Every single chapter of the Tao has some phrase you could spend the rest of your life endeavoring to remember when it mattered most, and this is one of them.
To care for all things: this is the highest achievement a person can attain. Not to rule the world in the sense of being obeyed by the world (good luck to you!), but of being responsible for it. In the sense of the world rightfully falling to you and into your care. All things is of course hyperbole, but it is easy enough to understand how it is meant to scale down to a level that is meaningful to you: all that crosses your path, all that is firmly placed within your purview by life, circumstances, fate, the Tao, whatever you want to say. Here we are, wrestling or bickering or negotiating or factionalizing or commiserating or competing with or much more commonly ignoring the world and people around us, when we could be caring for it.
What it means to care for the world, and the reasons why we should aspire to do so, are rooted in the previous stanzas: accept disgrace willingly. Accept misfortune as the human condition. Accept being unimportant. Do not be concerned with loss or gain. Misfortune comes from having a body. The chapter concludes by totally clarifying why we should come to accept these aspects of life, what we might do with ourselves if we weren’t mired in the feelings of resentment and pettiness brought on by the endless series of transgressions against our sensibilities and interruptions to our designs. Simply, we have to choose between taking ourselves seriously on the one hand and taking the world seriously on the other. Between being respected and showing respect. Are we to be the caretakers or do we need to be cared for? Are we the adults, or are we their children?
Surrender yourself humbly. No, this task is not beneath me. The needs of this person are not beneath me. Wherever I am in life, whatever my station, and whoever seems to need me, to all these I willingly devote my attention, my intelligence, my resources, and my time. Whatever life I thought I ought to have, and to have already had, only the life before me is actually my life. If I do not give myself over to it, I never actually live my life. I never truly live at all. I almost never bring the words of another text into this as an explanatory device, but do you not feel the echoes of he who saves his life will lose it (Matthew 16:25)? Holding out for some alternative and imaginary life, instead of putting all of yourself into this life, right now, is the way most people commit suicide every day.
Love the world as your own self. If you continue to cleave yourself away from the world, true peace and happiness are simply impossible. If you say you love yourself and despise the world, for example, what does that really mean, in practice, on a daily basis? The world is everywhere. Wherever you look, wherever you go, whoever you talk to, there it is, this world you despise. You say you love yourself, but nothing around you inspires loving feelings. You find nothing worthy of love, nothing and no one from whom you would gratefully accept love – how, then, do you ever enjoy the feeling of love? Can you be happy with yourself if you are surrounded on all sides, and at all times, by a world you dislike? A world that is merely an imposition, a disappointment, an obstacle, and, worst of all, a terrible mistake? This is the extremity of course, but it proves the point: there is no self love without love for the world. Love the world as your own self. The presumed necessity of the injunction presupposes that loving yourself is not enough by itself, and may not even be coherent or possible by itself. The person who loves himself or herself first and foremost is the person most concerned with being important, most concerned with losses and gains, most concerned with fortune and misfortune. The endless ups and downs, the endless insults to our pride; when do we think to ourselves, this basic orientation toward the world is not working for me. Maybe I’ve got it all backwards.
Treat the world with the importance you wish to be treated with: I can say it no more straightforwardly than that. Would it also not follow, then, that the person who has such an important world to care for, such important work to do, is also rather important? You become important by doing something important, which can only happen when you take something else more seriously than yourself. The more attention you are willing to give, the more you will have to attend to. You grow in stature, in significance, and, yes, in station and esteem, in direct relationship to the growth of your love and care for the world around you.
Then you can truly care for all things. I should say that this is not exactly altruism in the sense of depleting yourself for the sake of others. I believe what is being said here is closer to the idea that you are not important in and of yourself. You are important if you do something important. If you create and contribute something important. That feeling of wanting to matter, of wanting to be respected and regarded and treated with deference, cannot be demanded outright. It can be earned, however. Ironically, it will only come to the person who has set aside the need for it once and for all. When we hear of great people who were still very insecure and demanding, we feel a kind of pity: we seem to enjoy their success more than they do! How very sad, indeed. When you demand something from the world, no amount will ever be enough. When you set aside the need, or sublimate it into the need to give and attend to rather than the need to receive, even the slightest bit of recognition is felt as a ray of sunshine, a special treat, and an occasion for gratitude. You recognize the goodness in the other person, in that moment of them expressing appreciation, and you enjoy the feeling of admiring their virtues. How much nicer, how much fuller is this, than being the person who measures the crumb that is offered against the loaf that is owed? Accept being unimportant, then you can truly care for all things.
