It has become a commonplace in. literary criticism today to refer to the disparities which exist between certain portions of Lao Tsu’s Book of the Simple Way: to accept, with the limpid resignation of the scholar, the apparent confusions (the word is repeatedly used) of which the text seems so full. So far, it seems, no one has tried to disentangle the conflicting fibres of doctrine and statement. Indeed, the task is not one to attract the boldest of textual scholars, for properly speaking no text exists which would offer the reader any canon on which to build an analytical or critical scheme. Yet it seems to me that a method may be found — perhaps not stable or exhaustive enough to satisfy the pedant, but sufficiently exciting to interest the student of Tao — a method by which one may catch glimpses of the original work among the glozes and shifting emendations of later scribes. The clue lies embedded like a diamond in the body of the text itself; a clue sufficiently cardinal to allow one a firm working foundation.
Now Tao has been defined as a philosophy which remains always in sharp contradistinction to the Confucian (more generally the ‘Socratic’) dialect of the ethic; but it is more than that. (The word ‘Philosophy’ still carries with it the taint of method given it by the Greeks, from which it has been impossible to free it.) It is an attempt to localize an experience, which itself is too comprehensive to be included in the mere confines of language. Throughout the book one can feel the language probing, like a pair of giant callipers, attempting to circumscribe a realm, for the expression of which we have nothing between the madman’s idiom and the A minor Quartet. The searchlight of the ratiocinative principle is too weak to light up this territory: words themselves are used as a kind of sculpture, to symbolize what cannot be directly expressed: the heraldry of language is called into play to accentuate, to attest to, to pierce through the rind of the merely cognative impulse and delineate once and for all the mystery, the resting place of the Tao.
‘The true Tao is not the subject of discussion.’ In your opening statement you are faced with an attitude which, more exactly expressed as the text proceeds, ends in a complete and final denial of principle; a denial, in fact, of polarity, of schism. The affirmation here is that of a total personality, speaking from its totality. In the symbol of the Simple Way, expressed once and for all, you will find no trace of that abruption of the personality from its cosmos which has hallucinated European thought ever since pre-Socratic times. There is, to write nicely, no human entity; it is merged in the All. Here there is no trace of the rupture between the individual and his scenery. Fused, there remains only the gigantic landscape of the spirit, in which our Aryan problem (‘To be, or not to be’) is swallowed up, exhausted, sucked dry by the eternal factor — the Tao. The house admits its resident: the tenant is absorbed, like a piece of tissue, into the very walls of his spiritual house. The world of the definition is exploded. All this is so exhaustively written out in the book that it seems a little difficult at first to locate those areas in which the conflicting ideas enter. But with this profound clue (the denial, the absolution of principle) it would seem possible to retrace one’s steps; and against this rule, measure the various phases of the text.
One thing becomes clear: if the denial of the dogmatic principle is the key-note of the document, then what confusions there are operate always in the realm of the ethic. It is only here that the voice becomes muffled, that the statement, otherwise so pure in its lingual evasions of the rule, become muddy, ambiguous.
The struggle is directed always against the Confucian scheme, the precocious assumption of man over men, over God, over the spiritual landscape; and luckily for us the Confucian contribution serves admirably to light up for us those precise departments of the idea which might as yet remain obscure.
When a man with a taste for reforming the
world takes the business in hand, it
is easily seen that there is no end to it.
For spiritual vessels are not fashioned in
the world. Whoever makes, destroys;
whoever grasps, loses.
And again:
A sage is one who is full of rectitude,
but he does not, on that account, hack and
carve at others … He is upright and yet
does not undertake to straighten others.
In these two extracts from Lao Tsu his stance seems clearly enough defined. He refuses the dogma with its sharp black and white tones. Within the experience of which he talks there is room for infinite adjustment, infinite movement. The imposition of the iron scheme is a violence from which he utterly dissociates himself; his method is a wingless flying — an act which operates along a line where the mere mechanics of the act is lost; is irrelevant. His refusal to transform the flora and fauna of his world is a direct challenge to the world of dogmatic relations, where good is balanced against evil, black against white, being against non-being; the world of opposites, from which alone flowers the ethic, the canon, the principle. In his refusal to accept the limited concepts of language, he shows his wariness against the destroying, limiting effect of definition.
It is when we come to speak of Beauty as a thing
apart that we at once define Ugliness. So
when goodness is seen to be good, then we
become aware of what is evil … For this
reason the Sage only concerns himself with
that which does not give rise to prejudice.
He will not place himself at the mercy of the dogmatic principle, which, he realizes, can carry embedded in it the poisons of the divided personality, against which the volatile principle of being is at war. Consequently he sees that the ratiocinative principle itself must go; and as the document closes, this is the note which is sounded in a last exhaustion; the last attempt to speak coherently from the very heart of Tao.
If we accept this as the ultimate statement from which the Tao lives, then it at once becomes obvious that we have in our hands a clue which relates to the actual text. For it is precisely where there occur abrupt expressions of dogma that the same ‘confusions’ also arise of which our scholars have talked for so long.
But let us pause for a moment to consider those to whom we owe the impurities in the test. What concerned them was never the Tao itself (the inexpressible IT): but merely a means of realizing it, tapping reservoirs for Peace; transforming it into an ideal easily attainable by religious practice. The history of this book: the subsequent erection of a huge and corrupt dogmatic theology around it — these prove our point beyond all doubt. What concerned the men who came after was a practice of Tao — a thing which could never exist in something whose theme was merely the localization of The Experience, with which language could deal, at the best, imprecisely. Their concern was credo; a credo that carried with it the iron imperative.
If we go back, then, keeping this fact in mind, we at once fall upon passages which carry the strange theological imperatives bedded in them.
The pride of wealth and glory is companied
with care, so that one should come to a full
stop when a good work is completed, and when
honour is advancing.
The imperative here is barbed with implication; the theological overtone slightly too obvious.
By expelling impure things from the mind