When the Great Tao was abandoned,
There appeared humanity and justice.
When intelligence and wit arose,
There appeared great hypocrites.
When the six relations lost their harmony,
There appeared filial piety and paternal kindness.
When darkness and disorder began to reign in a kingdom,
There appeared the loyal ministers.
Again the first line gives the impression of a long gone
Golden Age, when the Great Tao was followed and everybody lived in perfect
harmony. Another way of putting this is:
to the follower of the Tao, even the display of humanity and justice are a
degradation of the ideal.
When there are notions of humanity in people’s minds, there
must also be notions of inhumanity; when justice is being applauded, there is,
of necessity, the suffering of injustice.
The people are not living directly in the beautiful,
peaceful clarity of the present moment; they are clearly filtering reality
through thought, and seeing not with their eyes but with shadowy mental concepts. They are not living in simple spontaneous
trust, but are being judgemental, acting on these erroneous judgements, and
thereby distorting the natural flow of the Tao.
Remember: according to the Taoist, all judgement is made in
error, and we are as wrong to extol the good as we are to deprecate the bad.
When intelligence and wit arose,
There appeared great hypocrites.
Intelligence only arises in the degraded all-too-human world
where there are shared mental concepts of reality. Some people live easily and thrive in the
conceptual world; others – very often those of innate spiritual clarity – find it
hard to prosper in the abstract world of the intelligence.
The ‘intelligent’ ones therefore find it easy to dupe the
more simple-minded. For where there is
conceptual truth, there is the possibility of shielding this truth from those
who believe they need it. The clever are
able to use their skills to turn falsehood into truth and vice versa.
When the six relations lost their harmony,
There appeared filial piety and paternal kindness.
The six relations (father and son; elder and younger
brother; husband and wife) are here describing the natural bonds the form
between people in society.
It is perfectly natural, and entirely in keeping with the
Tao if a man devotes more time to the woman who gave birth to his children,
than to the woman living next door.
Such fidelity comes as an instinct, and he shall feel any
force preventing this as a matter of conscience. This bond does not need to be formally
consecrated in the form of marriage; any
such ceremony is nothing other than a simulacrum of what shall naturally
occur.
But, when the people start to reverse the situation, and
imagine that the ceremony causes the faithful
bond, great disharmony is likely to ensue. A man shall believe that fidelity comes after
the ceremony. And the ceremony, he sees
to his delight, can be wilfully performed with women who offer all sorts of
quite irrelevant qualities: for example, women who have wealthy relations. The natural faithful love and solicitude,
however, does not come as he expects.
And the reverse is also true. When there are no ceremonies of consecration,
there is no bond other than what is felt in our hearts and sense of
conscience. When this bond dissolves, as
well it might, there is therefore no expectation that it should continue any
further. A couple are free to come
together by instinct, and then part by the same instinct, and there shall be no
feelings of rancour nor regret.
If we are ignorant enough to believe that we can love as an
act of will, we are likely commit ourselves to vows that we are unable to
keep. And it is precisely this sense of
failure that creates the very bitter mutual recrimination that so commonly surrounds divorce. The artificial joy of the wedding, and the
unnecessary pain of divorce go very much hand-in-hand.
When darkness and disorder began to reign in a kingdom,
There appeared the loyal ministers.
The same idea is presented here as it applies to the world
of politics. Loyal ministers are
features of a situation where there are also disloyal ministers. What is the disloyal minister? He is the man who has developed different
intellectual notions about how the state should
be run. He can imagine in his mind
all sorts of better ways. Now it is his
master’s old enemy who seems to have the better ideas; it is to him that the
loyal minister now turns, transforming himself into the disloyal minister.
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