Post #153: The Fool and the Tao

21 Oct. 2024

Others have a home;

I am alone, with nowhere to go.

Others are wealthy;

I live hand to mouth.

Others are clear and bright;

I am dim and confused.

Others are sharp and clever;

I am dull and foolish.

Others are busy and purposeful;

I am drifting along, uncertain and awkward.

I am not like others;

I take my sustenance from the Tao.

—Based on ch. 20, Tao Te Ching*

     Folly is not the most pleasant quality in others, and the thought that one might be as foolish as they, or even more so, is not usually a welcome one. If the Path to the Tao leads through foolishness, would not most of us be readier to turn away rather than towards it? And yet the Tao Te Ching (and not it alone among sacred texts) can sound as if it were giving an endorsement to the dullard or the bum: what to make of this?

     We might start by noticing that it is no ordinary fool we have before us here: such a base specimen would laugh boisterously at the Tao (ch. 41), not take his sustenance from it. There is a lightness to our Taoist “fool,” but it does not come from mere air-headedness.

     Isolating oneself by being contrary, disagreeable, and difficult is no great accomplishment; good friendship, not social withdrawal, is the Tao no less than the Buddha’s Path (#6, #36). Yet how often does the clinging to company at any price bespeak an inability to be on own’s own, or an unwillingness to think for oneself; how often is it merely herd-instinct or Cave-mentality. (On the other hand, how often is showy independence just another way of saying “Look at me”!)

     A real home is nothing to scoff at. Nostos, the yearning for home that gives us nostalgia, is an archetypal theme that stands, with the Odyssey, at the cradle of literature—and does it not speak to all of us, though we may understand it in different ways? Our attachments to place are human all-too human, and not something we should sneer at; but do they, can they point the way to the Way? Or would it not be truer to say that our wish to be at home holds us back, trapping us in the illusion that we are meant to make our homes in the apparent world only?** Are we not, instead, to be pilgrims in this Valley of the Shadow of Death, guests staying for a while at an inn along the road, as Epictetus expressed it so aptly (Enchiridion 11), not permanent residents, let alone owners of the homes we inhabit for a bit before we pass along?

     The good things of the world and the resources that make them possible are gifts to be grateful for, not something to be made light of or scorned with derision. It is equally true, however, that wealth can and often does go to the head (among the propertied and their admirers alike) and that gains, spectacular gains especially, will often stoke rather than tamp down the flames of craving. Alas, it is only too common for the rich, instead of becoming the more generous the better they can afford it, to turn out the worst penny-pinchers of all. If it weren’t so in a deplorable number of cases, nobody would laugh with recognition at the jest that they didn’t get to where they are by giving anything away. That a rich man would find it quite as difficult to enter by the narrow gate as a camel through the eye of the needle has perhaps been somewhat exaggerated, and exacerbated by doubtful translation; but there remains an uncomfortable truth at its heart nonetheless. Wealth should be an unmitigated blessing, but it can easily turn into an encumbrance, a distraction, even a source of corruption. “Truly one may gain by losing, and one may lose by gaining” (Tao Te Ching, ch. 42).

     A keen and clever mind too is surely a gift, but one that cuts (and slashes) all the more readily the sharper it is, and often alienates us from others. The vanity, pride, and haughtiness of the quick-minded is no secret to anyone; they are said not to suffer fools gladly, Taoist or not. It would be stupidity itself to spurn the fruits of learning, so long as they are garnered with discernment and discrimination; yet even the most committed student of books must admit that of making them there is no end, and that much study is wearisome, and not only to the flesh either (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Likewise, who would dare slight the value of work, and of pursuing a clear purpose in this world; I have myself stressed repeatedly how much something of the kind is needed to sustain our sense of meaning in life (#100). At the same time, it has long been insisted upon by much higher spirits than mine that the very flowers in the field, though neither toiling nor spinning, are yet more gloriously arraigned than any king (Matthew 6:28-29). Another poetic exaggeration, it may be, but with an undeniable kernel of truth.

     Few of us would rush to be considered poor in spirit, or models of meekness: yet theirs is the kingdom of heaven, we are told, and they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:3,5). Perhaps these distinctively Christian tones will be dismissed, by some, as a blatant inversion of the Roman master-morality, as per Nietzsche’s argument; what the Tao would remind us of, even so, is the complex connections they reveal between conceptual pairs that we understand too simply as opposites and nothing more. Rich and poor, clever and dull, purposeful and drifting, wise and foolish, so the Taoist would insist, are not simply negations, but complex unities in which sometimes the one, sometimes the other side predominates, but never by making the other go away.

     In the yin-yang, the Taoist symbol, blacks and whites exist side by side; all is not shades of gray, as we sometimes imagine in our more relativistic modern moods. Though grays too have their place, seemingly stark and irreconcilable oppositions are a vital part of the Tao. Yet what is contrary is not therefore unconnected, but rather indissolubly bound up: for the Taoist there is always white inside the black, and black inside the white. Thus in wisdom there is a grain of folly, as in folly there is a grain of wisdom; the smartest can still be very stupid, the stupidest smart; poverty of spirit goes as commonly with material wealth as riches of the soul can thrive in conditions of outward poverty. Yin and yang, masculine and feminine,*** mind and body, day and night, even good and bad: these are not shapeless globs, with no significant distinctions between them, no right and wrong times and places for one as against the other. Our choices between them are crucial, and yet, even so, they belong together inextricably. How much connects love and hate was understood by human beings intuitively long before Freud; but his profound elaborations on the theme are some of the most impressive and memorable in the Freudian oeuvre.

     Consider what an intricate business it is to keep your balance properly while walking upright, which is why human infants, though so much more cognitively capable than those of other species, take so much longer to learn it properly. The Tao seems at times to celebrate the ease of childhood, but this tends to be too much idealized in hindsight: growing up to adulthood is anything but easy, and while happy children may be so more unreservedly than their elders, an unhappy child is a very miserable being indeed, often over the smallest things, because the helplessness is so much greater, and the capacity for putting things into perspective so much less developed.

     It may be possible to move, very laboriously, on one leg, but no one can walk that way, nor by simply putting equal weight on both feet. Instead, what must be done is to keep adjusting, every moment anew, a most intricate and constantly shifting balance between the two sides, now a little more weight here, not a little more there. The slightest error would throw us off and trip us up, and yet we learn to perform this highly complex task quite naturally and skillfully, even elegantly and gracefully sometimes, to the point of being able to dance in the most elaborate patterns without having to think about it at all. (Indeed thinking about it too deliberately, on the dance floor or elsewhere in action, may prove quite detrimental, as for the centipede in the story who kept his countless legs faultlessly coordinated until a toad, in jest, asked him just how he was able to do it, upon which he could do it no more.†)

     To get the important things in life right is subtle, difficult, and effortful: pulling the countless divergent strands together may take years of practice, or decades even, if it can be done in one lifetime at all. The touch of refinement is acquired not by application only, by doing, but just as much by not doing—by letting things grow and ripen in their own due course, without any premature grasping after the fruit. (Thus chapter 15: “He who keeps the Tao does not rush into early ripening.”) And yet, despite so much that goes into making a master at anything, when the elusive mastery has been achieved at last, it may seem the most natural and effortless thing in the world, so spontaneously and easily does it seem to flow forth.†† That is the Tao.

PS: Are there likely to be any masters of the Tao in the world today, you may ask, real Taoist sages living in our midst? Why not: if every art has is champions and heroes, then why not the art of living, which is what both the Tao and the Dhamma come down to. The more difficult question is where you might hope to find them, and how you would recognize who they are. That it may take one to know one is a first dimension of the difficulty; that the Tao precludes drawing undue attention to one’s strengths, a second (ch. 22); that no Taoist master would be eager to speak whereof one cannot speak without distortion and inviting misunderstanding, a third. The deepest Tao cannot be talked about, remember, only hinted at (ch. 1); and those who speak, at least too readily, do not know, while those who do know, do not speak, at least not so readily (ch. 56). The Taoist sage is no mere fool; but who knows, he might look like one to you, if you went looking, and you might overlook him on that account. But perhaps all that is beside the point anyway: the search for new, live Taoist masters in our day may be fascinating, but it must remain uncertain; meanwhile the old master still speaks to us, undiminished by time and distance, if we only know how to listen.

*I don’t know Chinese and the above lines are less a quotation than a riff, based on cues from several translations, especially the one by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. Where I quote, I follow John Wu’s classic rendition.

**There is a reason why the Buddha (before his breakthrough!) walked out on a young wife and their newborn child, and why, in the mature Teaching too, “going forth into homelessness” (without abandoning responsibilities already undertaken and not adequately resolved) remains a legitimate, respectable, even recommended, though by no means required, expression of serious practice.

***No one could accuse “the old master” Lao Tzu of undue favoritism in this touchy area: “Know the masculine, keep to the feminine” (ch. 28), he counsels, but on premises for which our age seems to have lost all sensitivity: “The feminine always conquers the masculine by her quietness” (ch. 61).

†Thus a nursery rhyme by Katherine Craster, supposedly first published in Cassell's Weekly in 1871, but since circulated in different versions:

The centipede was happy, quite,

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

This worked his mind to such a pitch,

He lay distracted in a ditch,

Considering how to run.

††However prominent the element of ease may become by the end, it cannot be the starting point (ch. 63): “He who thinks everything easy will end up finding everything difficult.” Here as elsewhere, seeming opposites belong together: “Difficult and easy complement each other” (ch. 2).