DAO DE JING: POEM 11

You arrange thirty spokes to make a wheel

But the hole in its center

Is what makes the wheel useful.

You spin and fashion clay to make a bowl

But its inner vacancy 5

Is what makes the bowl useful.

You build walls, floor, and roof to make a house

But the interior space

Is what makes the house useful.

Thus it profits us to work with what is 10

So we can use what is not.

***

NOTES

line 7: I have taken a liberty here; more literally, the original reads, “You cut doors and windows to make a house.”

COMMENTARY

Porgy isn’t the only one to sing his satisfaction at having plenty of nothing. Laozi uses poem 11 to celebrate nothing’s utility, a paradox in which Daoist thought delights. This joy in nothing has several sources, starting with the Yin-Yang polarity and its implications that, just as something contains nothing, so too must nothing contain something (see Introduction section IV.1). There’s also the void nature of Dao itself, the efficacy of non-action (see Introduction section IV.3), and the personal experience of empowerment through stillness and meditation. Here in poem 11 Laozi is specifically praising nothing for its potentiality – where you go with your wheel, what you pour in your bowl, how you live in your house, the possibilities are endless. (The quality of potentiality is also what charms him about the uncarved block; see Introduction section IV.4.) This understanding derives from his love of humble and mundane things, real things, a love that permeates the Dao De Jing. It also implies the complementary truth: If nothing is useful, then a lot of material things, including some that we strive for bitterly, are useless and burdensome and ultimately destructive. This insight, also evoked in poems 3 and 9, is explicit in poem 12.

Links To:

Poem 12

The 81 Poems: Contents

The Classic of Dao and De by Laozi: Contents

For more on Daoism, see:

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