One ring to rule them all.
That’s the famous line from The Lord Of The Rings. The ONE ring, the one source of power that controls all the rest.
There were other rings, many others in fact, that were given to numerous people in various positions of power, but, secretly, one ring controlled them all.
In the books and the film adaptations, these rings were all created by the arch nemesis, Sauron.
But is there an equivalent to The One Ring in real life, created by the good guys? Is there one thing, hidden away, that controls all the other levers that are visible publicly? One thing, that, if seized and taken control of, makes control of all the rest next to effortless?
For you and me, in other words for regular people trying to live good lives, The One Ring is wisdom. Good judgment. Right thinking. The proper use of whatever information we have.
If you think The Lord of the Rings is an old book, let’s look at a much older one: The Ramayana. The Ramayana is the tale of Rama, an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, the Hindu God that sustains the universe (as opposed to Brahma, the creator, and Shiva, the destroyer).
Long story short, Rama and his allies undertake the arduous mission of dethroning and defeating the Demon King Ravana (not unlike Sauron in terms of his evil intent, but, rather unlike Sauron, still having a body. Ravana is, in fact, a serial rapist, murderer, and so on).
The good guys ultimately win, but in the immediate aftermath of their victory, something quite interesting happens. I say “interesting,” because, years after reading Ramesh Menon’s beautiful translation of the ancient epic, this is the one and only line from the book that I remember, verbatim, after only reading it once.
Here’s what happened.
The good guys win, and almighty Shiva himself appears before the victorious heroes to grant them any wish they choose. Literally anything. It’s worth taking a moment to contemplate what you might wish for.
Among them is Vibhishana, not insignificantly the younger brother of Ravana. When the Lord Shiva asked him which boon to grant him, Vibhishana said, and let this be emblazoned across your mind forever,
“Let my first thought always be of dharma.”
And what is dharma? The Sanskrit root of the word means “to uphold.” So, that which holds this all together, what edifies and rightens the world, the principles-in-practice that lead us goodness and deliver us from wickedness – that is dharma.
Let my first thought always be of dharma. Let me always think wisely.
Vibhishana was wise enough to wish for wisdom. The story of the Ramayana, like Tolkien’s classic, is not just an accounting of our team beating the other team, but a parsing of right from wrong, wisdom from folly, in such a way that we might grow in understanding by reading and reflecting on it: we divide the world not into us and them but into right and wrong, good and evil, wisdom and folly.
Those lines will not obey the us/them distinction, as evidenced by the fact that Vibhishana is the brother of the villain, Ravana. In the Lord Of The Rings, Gandalf must defeat his own peer and former mentor, Saruman. The sentiment is the same: if the world is to be divided, let it be along lines of morality, ethics, and virtue. Let the good triumph over the wicked, even the wicked among us.
Let me take it a step further:
Let what is good, virtuous, and wise within you triumph over that which is wicked within you. Ravana and Vibhishana were brothers, born of the same parents, raised in the same household.
With that in mind, with this raised sense of urgency and consequence in mind, I wish to outline the meaning of chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way. My invocation of the Tao is quite close to Vibhishana’s invocation of Dharma: that which upholds.
Come with me on this journey into the obscure and esoteric: what we are looking for, what we are actually hammering into its shape with each discussion, is The One Ring of wisdom, of Dharma, of Tao.
I’ll begin by reprinting the chapter in full, and then exploring its meaning one idea at a time. Let’s get started.
FIVE
Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.
We essentially have two halves, one fairly straightforward, the second more subtle. As is often or even always the case with Lao Tzu, the simple is the solid foothold from which you step across the chasm to the deeper idea. He always gives you the means by which to do this. He always gives you the low rungs on the ladder to get you going.
Heaven and earth are ruthless;
They see the ten thousand things as dummies.
The wise are ruthless;
They see the people as dummies.
What are we to make of this word, “ruthless?” It means having no pity or compassion for others. It neither denotes nor connotes, however, ill intent or hostility. Rather, it highlights the coldness of an amoral universe.
The world is pitiless: unmoved by the suffering of its inhabitants. Not unaware: unmoved. Exceptions are not made in view of pain, loss, or even tragedy.
The world is the way that it is, and there is no operant power in it that will tilt the scales, look the other way, or otherwise grease the wheels if it can just be moved to sympathy. No. This sentiment also appears in Steven Mitchell’s translation of the Book of Job: behold, hope is a lie. More famously still, it is inscribed over the gates of Hell in canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno: lasciate ogne ‘speranza, voi ch’intrate (abandon all hope, ye who enter here): the rules shall not be bent for you, wretched creature.
As harsh as this is, it is a critical step toward wisdom. Heaven and Earth are ruthless, and the wise, too, are ruthless. Neither admit of exceptions. Neither traffic in sentimentality or sympathy.
Now hold on a moment. Usually, when we think of wisdom we also think of benevolence, but these opening lines appear to shatter that completely.
We will have to repeatedly and often forcefully cleave apart pitilessness on the one hand and active malice on the other: the former is what we are dealing with, and it is, in fact, the only way by which the latter can be contended with.
What do I mean? Wisdom is what keeps you on the right path, by definition. This means there can be no room for fanciful nonsense, whimsical make believe, naive aspirations toward fairy tale endings. The wise are ruthless, and see the people “as dummies.”
In other words, as objects completely helpless in the face of the forces governing them.
If heaven and earth, which is to say the natural world, has no pity for the plight of its plants and animals, and those that make it make it and those that don’t don’t, then the wise sages have the resolve to admit that human affairs are no different. If food runs out, there is starvation. If shelter is not secured, the elements will take you out. If the cut is not cleaned, infection will set in.
This is ruthless simplicity: we are caught in the middle of countless cause and effect relationships, and they are all as unalterable as the laws of physics and other biological realities.
“Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies” is not the refrain of the sage. A sage faces reality, and whether in the form of direct instruction or simply an instructive example, shows you how to do the same.
So far, I have been correct, but still incomplete. Benevolence must be addressed. Because, like I said before, a sage is benevolent. Wisdom is benevolence itself. How, may I ask, can benevolence be exercised in an uncaring world? And, how are people who are so often the authors of their own suffering, for reasons and in ways too numerous to enumerate, to be cared for? No honest person over a certain age can deny the frequency with which efforts to help others quickly dead-ends in frustration.
It is all too often because the naively well-meaning among us are rushing to the aide of the naively inept: help that is not truly helpful is being offered to those who are unable to receive. A stalemate, or a tragedy of errors, in the making.
In other words, a person who has not truly faced reality is seeking to remedy the reality of another
It is a hell of a statement to say that “the wise are ruthless.” Why? Because the council of a wise person is the best you could hope for. Or maybe you’d like to tell me what you’d rather have in a piece of advice or a bit of help than wisdom. Let us just say it then: the most helpful possible person is also someone characterized by ruthlessness.
Or did you already know that?
If error, if avoidable suffering, is caused by illusions, help worthy of the name can only come from someone with none, and such a person will seem downright ruthless to the deluded.
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
This is the truly esoteric idea at the core of the chapter. Once we understand its meaning on its own, we can look at how its meaning is extended by the lines that come before and after.
Let’s start by rewording this strange phrase as “the world moves, but it doesn’t change.” I will come back to this, but I have to tease out or demystify it a bit more first.
Something else the metaphor of the bellows implies is that what “it yields” is just the movement of air. The air it draws into itself when it opens is the same air it expels when it closes: the more it moves, the more it yields.
In other words, look at “the ten thousand things,” which is to say, the contents of the world, less as many individual objects and more like a singular expression of a convulsing world.
Its shape is changing in the sense that it is moving, but the form doesn’t change. Meaning, the movements are built into the way it is structured: the form can remain static even as the shape moves, and moves much air in the process.
What, finally, does this mean? What if I answer with another question (forgive me): what if all you’re seeing before you, day after day, year after year, is movement, not change?
From one person to the next, one situation to the next, one relationship to the next, one environment with its set of dynamics, personalities, and politics to the next – it’s all just “the world.” All of this, all of it, is nothing but the world.
Are you seeing it? Not reducible to a unit smaller than “the world!”
This is why the idea of change is taken off the table, and replaced with the more limited concept of movement (this is what is meant by drawing a distinction between “shape” and “form”).
What this means is that there is not nor could there be, for someone seeing the world in this way, such a thing as novelty. Or anonymity. Or running away and starting over. When you were born, you entered into an exclusive relationship with something called The World. Every distinct person, every distinct circumstance, is still just you and the world taking a long walk together. It is all the same, ever the same, inescapably the same.
This means that everything you say or do, you say or do to the world itself. No slate is wiped clean by the revolving door of faces, situations, and circumstances.
This is intrinsically related to the ruthlessness of both heaven and earth and the wise: if there is never change, only movement, then there is no running away from the consequences of your actions, no dodging, no concealing, no procrastinating.
If there is nowhere to go, because the world is a single indivisible mass and does not break down into any, and I mean any constituent parts, then whatever is broken or incomplete in your understanding of and relationship to the world may as well be faced down and resolved right here, right now.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the center.
The missing piece in our lives is not, I promise you, more words. You don’t need more theories, explanations, ideas, and dreams, but a firmer and less-frequently-interrupted grip on reality. You need to feel the center, to make it central, and to stay right there, right with it.
Thoughtless and self indulgent speech takes you away from the center. Words make conceptual maps of the world. More words can make you think the world itself has expanded. Uncovering a new idea – surely there are objective natural phenomena that correspond to these word-pictures? Maybe not. You can use words as if to fashion a brand new key. You now assume there is a special door somewhere waiting to be opened by it.
But the world we construct out of words, the world of abstractions, of which political or religious rhetoric is filled to the brim, is like the incomprehensibly large keyring of a janitor in a high rise building –
Except that none of those keys correspond to actual doors. They are just there, jingling at the jostling of your hips, like the ringing of a bell that heralds the presence of the man of knowledge, the sophisticated person.
There was only ever the world, the one and only true world, and because it is the one and only, there isn’t even a door, isn’t even a key, and there never was.
Wisdom is the ruthlessness that strips all this make believe away, sees the one and only real shape standing in the room full of mirrors, holding fast to the center all the while.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.
-Jas
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