Tao Tuesday – Chapter 34
Every Tuesday, Amy Putkonin posts a chapter from her version of the Tao Te Ching HERE, and invites other bloggers to offer their commentary as well. I always read the chapter, write my understanding of it, then read her and other posts to add to whatever direct insigh. I hope you will do the same. If you write a blog post, please link to Tao Te ching daily in your post, and join the links on the chapter page there.
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The Great Tao is like the ocean -
It flows in all directions.
It gives life to the Ten Thousand Things,
yet does not claim authority
When work is done,
it claims no credit.
It clothes the Ten Thousand Things,
yet does not want to be its leader.
Eternally desireless,
it is considered insignificant.
The Ten Thousand Things call it home,
but do not make it their master.
It can be called great
because it does not strive to be great.
Thus, it achieves the path of greatness.
The “Great Tao” here is the larger, un-nameable inclusive everything all-that-is Tao from earlier chapters. Author Richard Bach calls this same thing the IS or the IS-ness of all the universe.
The phrase “gives life to the ten thousand things yet does not claim authority” is the key of this chapter. In ancient China, where the Tao Te Ching was written, “Ten Thousand Things” was a way to a communicates huge, almost incomprehensible number…like we might say Trillions, or “bajillions” or some such thing. It is another way to allude to that “Great Tao”, the all-that-IS.
Here in the west, especially here in America, where old middle Eastern, Abrahamic religions are so dominant, when we read “gives life” to all things, we tend to think ”create” all things…as in a Creator-diety. I don’t think that is the case here. I think of it more in terms of “Source” or “Wellspring”. Only because the all-that-IS totality exists, can the ten thousand individual little things within it exist. Think of a spring coming from the side of a mountain. Does the mountain create the spring? No. They are intimately related parts of the totality of the cosmos…they are both part of Planet Earth. The rocks of the mountain channel the hidden groundwater to the surface, and in that sense “gives life” to the spring, but it didn’t “create” it in the dominant sense of Western theology. It created it because their mutual existence allowed the spring to be. No mountain, no spring. No water, no spring – it is a matter of co-creation really. Neither has authority over the other, both are essential, both are part of the larger picture.
The creator has power over the created, like the father in Bill Cosby’s comedy album “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out – and make another one that looks just like you!”. While not literally right, this the tacit meaning of the divine creator/destroyer kinds of creation mythologies.
In this chapter we see the Tao is just the opposite. It is a source, but all things within the great Tao are co-creators. Everything calles the all-that-IS home, not master. Without the Ten Thousand Things, there is no all-that-IS, no Tao. Without the Tao, there is no Ten Thousand Things. It isn’t a creaote-created relationship. It isn’t a matter of authority, it is a matter of coexistence as part of a larger wholeness. The Tao doesn’t strive for greatness, it simple is greatness. That wholeness doesn’t try to be everything, to create everything…it just simply IS everything.
