KaiMen

The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu (circa 500 BCE), is not only a foundational text of both Taoism and Chinese culture, but also key to the theories and ideas behind many Chinese martial arts.  Unfortunately the text is very inscrutable, regardless as to whether one knows Chinese.  This inscrutability is due to its antiquity and to the way it was written, both in form and content.

In form, it is very poetically terse, using as few words as possible.  For this reason, translations that are minimal are best, in that they match the original temper of the work most closely.

In content, it relies on allusions to other written works or stories familiar in Lao Tzu’s day, but that have been lost to history and are now untraceable, even to contemporary native Chinese.   This was a stylistic technique common during his time.  For example, nowadays in American culture, if in the midst of a poem one writes the single line, “like a camel passing through the eye of a needle”, or “I have a dream”, most readers would know the back stories to which the phrase alludes, and would then take that knowledge and read it back into the poem.  Readers from other cultures, or in the future, would likely miss the allusions completely.  The Tao Te Ching also employs many vague, difficult concepts, concepts which are crucial to understanding not only the poem but also the martial theories based on or referring to them.

The notes that follow come from several years of working with this text in a philosophical context, in the classroom, and in regard to Chinese martial arts.  I’m not saying that these are exactly right; however, I will say that I have found them very helpful in penetrating and understanding this work, especially for martial practice for everyday life. I hope you find them helpful as well.

The two primary concepts are obviously Tao and Te.  (Sometimes these are spelled “Dao” and “De”, depending on the system one uses to convert Chinese into the Latin alphabet.)  Tao is the All, just like in ancient Greek Stoicism to Pan.  So Tao is not just nature, the flora and fauna of Earth, but also stars, space, planets, as well as your computer screen, the cars outside, the building you’re in, the dust floating nearby, your clothing and everything else around you.  The central characteristic of everything, of All, is that it is in constant change, propelled by an interaction of opposites: female/male, odd/even, negative/positive, active/passive, full/empty, and so on.  This interaction of opposites is depicted by the yin-yang­ symbol.  As the symbol notes, within yin there is also a bit of yang, and within yang there is a bit of yin.  In simplest terms, one opposite cannot exist without the other.  This means that there are no absolutes in the All, and that All is a system of interdependence.

If Tao is the All, Te is the laws that everything in the cosmos follows.  The laws (or principles) include ones that we are familiar with: gravity, thermodynamics, evolution, chemical reaction and so forth.  But Te also includes laws that we may be less familiar with, like those involving psychology, the interaction between mind and matter, and those behind the I Ching and Taoist astrology. Te may include the structure of the All as well, in the same way the patterns of a crystal or molecule reflect an invisible structure: the lines connecting the different atoms in the depiction of a molecule aren’t really there in the molecule, but the layout of the atoms in a way reveal those lines, and the atoms behave in the molecule as if the lines were there.  The relation between Tao (the atoms) and Te (the lines) are similar.

The laws and structure of the Tao is one side of Te, the impersonal side.  The personal side is the Te of how we live our lives.  We have certain principles (or laws) that we live by, and center our lives around a certain structure or routine.  Also, just by being human, we have a certain Te that fits just us.  So this personal Te is both species-specific and specific to the individual.  For example, the Te of a golden retriever is to retrieve.  Some will prefer retrieving in water, others prefer the Frisbee, others a live animal.  Golden retrievers share as well the Te that all other dogs have qua dogs.  However, all have the specific Te to retrieve.  If a golden retriever does not retrieve, it is either sick, or “defective”, in some way.  The Te of a racehorse is to race; that of a draft horse to pull a wagon or plow.  Each individual horse will have its preferences, and have certain jobs or work (another concept that appears in the poem) that it is better at than others, but all will share certain commonalities too.  Humans are just the same.

Now the goal of Taoist philosophy is to have one’s personal and species Te synchronize or match up with the Te of everything in the cosmos, the Te of the Tao.  For plants, non-human animals, and for the ancients (another key concept), this more or less automatically happens.  But for us moderns, which includes people from Lao Tzu’s time, it does not.  If a golden retriever is cooped up in a room or crate all day, this is sheer unhappiness for the dog, and the dog will exhibit this by chewing on itself or ripping up a couch.  The same applies for us humans.  If our daily lives run contrary to our Te, and thereby to the Tao, we will become ill, especially mentally, and take out our frustrations and unhappiness in various ways.  So, the more one achieves this synchronization, the more one is in tune with the Tao, the happier one will be. The less one achieves this, the unhappier one will be.  In a way then, we have a built-in meter to tell us whether our personal Te is dissonant or consonant with the impersonal Te.  In other but equivalent words, the more one accepts one’s Fate, the happier one will be; the more one fights their destiny the more unhappy one will be.

This conception of Fate, which is very important in Taoist philosophy, is somewhat different from that in the West.  (I personally don’t agree with the East/West distinction, but it is a convenient shorthand.)   Nowadays we assume Fate to be something like “they were destined to meet and fall in love” or “I guess it’s just my fate never to find a decent job”; i.e., some event we can’t really escape or avoid.  In the Tao Te Ching, Fate is more like a function that is built into us, built into things, and built into the universe.  So the Taoist conception is more like “it’s the fate of my iPod to play music”, or “the fate of my chow chows is to guard the property”.  Were a Taoist to say “Dong Hai Chuan was destined to create an intricate martial art”, this doesn’t mean that no matter what he did in life, he was going to create Ba Gua.  Instead, it means that given his personality, the stars he was born under, his time, place and background, he was “made” to make this art.  He could have fought this fate, but would’ve been miserable, and in a way the Tao would, in its own impersonal, clockwork-functioning way, would have thrown countless obstacles in his rebellious path.  This personal function is what synchronizes or not with the function of the Tao.  If it doesn’t synchronize, it’s like a gear with broken teeth spinning around in a clock.  The gear is unhappy, so to speak, and the clock doesn’t keep the time.

Much of the Tao Te Ching is about what the Te of a human being is (especially those who are rulers or leaders), so I will leave that up to you, the reader, to determine.  However, in the next installment, I will discuss how these concepts apply to the martial arts.  In so doing, we’ll meet two more crucial concepts, non-action and action.