Various images are used to express the idea that the essence of the material and the sensible lies in the immaterial and the invisible, that the “fullness” is ordered to “emptiness”: a reference to the metaphysical plane and a reference concordant with the nature of non-acting. Continue reading
Do not listen with the ear nor with the heart, but only with the spirit. To block the way of the senses, to keep the mirror of the heart pure. To keep oneself empty. From the outside, do not let things that no longer have names penetrate inside (impressions liberated from mental translations). Continue reading
References, through images, to the law of converting everything that is joined at the extreme into the opposite. Decadence begins at the peak. For essential mastery and for control of the transformations, it is necessary to know how to abandon at the right point what is brought to completion. Continue reading
← Chapter 7 Chapter 9 → Chapter 8 The transcendent quality resembles water Without resisting it assumes the form of each thing It takes the lowest position that men scorn (because they are seeking the heights) The farther one is from acting in common, the more one is close to the … Continue reading
The characters used in the first line, “Heaven and Earth”, express the idea of totality, and it is not the “nameable”, qualified Principle, that is referred to here but to action that makes it eternal: it “is” in the transcendent sense since it is denied. Continue reading
There is a possible interaction in this chapter of the doctrine of the Tao with residues of the archaic conception of the primogenial maternal Feminine (Magna Mater Genitrix, i.e., Great Mother). Continue reading
Since he reproduces in himself the detached quality of the Principle, the True Man likewise ignores human concern. Action from the “center” is counterposed from a neutrality free from preferences and sentimentality, in view not of part, but of the whole, of the Universal. Continue reading
Chuang Tzu makes clear that one can admit the principle of a universal regulator (from which the principle of every unity, family, people, etc. derives through participation) but on condition that one does not make a distinct personal being out of what is intended “as an influence without a comprehensible form” Continue reading
The internal logic corroborates instead the lesson here adopted. Non-knowing and non-desiring (in the sense of discursive knowing and the desiring of the individual) are the traits repeatedly attributed to the True Man of the Tao Te Ching which in him are virtues insofar as they would be the opposite in laymen and the common people Continue reading
the relativity and the irrelevance of human distinctions is deduced from the principle of correlation of opposites; therefore, of all the current values which correspond to nothing in reality: “only great spirits are capable of understanding.” (Chuang Tze) Continue reading