Induce the peak of emptiness.
Hold fast to stillness.
The ten thousand things
Emerging as one
I watch them and see their return. 5
Truly
All thrive in profusion.
All go back to their source.
Going back to the source
Is the meaning of stillness. 10
We call this the destined return.
The destined return is constant.
Knowing constancy is enlightening.
Not knowing constancy is delusion
The onset of catastrophe. 15
Knowing constancy, you are wide open.
Being wide open makes you impartial.
Being impartial makes you regal.
Being regal accords with Heaven.
Accordance with Heaven accords with Dao. 20
Accordance with Dao accords with eternity.
Thus all your days will be free from harm.
***
NOTES
line 5, return: See Introduction section IV.7.
line 22: This line also appears in poem 52.
COMMENTARY
Poem 4 tells us that Dao is endless stillness; poem 15, that stillness can generate action. But it is here in poem 16 that Laozi connects stillness with going back to the source. In a 2005 comic, Robert Crumb depicted himself preparing to do his daily meditation, grumbling in a thought balloon about “the stupendous inner struggle, the thousands of hours of meditation it takes to truly confront old age and death.”[1] The scene is funny for a lot of reasons (the only quiet place where he can meditate is the bathroom), but there is a kernel of truth here. Of course meditation should have no struggle to it – the more you strive, the more you’re doing things wrong (as poem 8 concludes), because De is there to see to it that your self-realization and accomplishments in life are achieved as part of a natural process. Moreover, the actual practical benefit of daily meditation is to decondition the mind, to stop confusing yourself with your thoughts and feelings and material possessions, to step back from all that. But stillness is also about being willing to let go of the body and of life, willing to make what Laozi here quite rightly calls the destined return. That return is always happening all around us – I watch them and see their return – and its constancy leads the poem into a reflection on the power of constancy, a theme evoked in poem 1. Here we’re shown how that power leads you into ascending levels of sensibility, culminating in Dao.
FOOTNOTE
1. Aline and R. Crumb, “Saving Face” in Drawn Together. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, p. 234.
Links To:
The Classic of Dao and De by Laozi: Contents
For more on Daoism, see:
Film Dreams: Frank Capra
Music: KALW Radio Show #3, Ancient China in 20th-Century Music
Music: SFCR Radio Show #8, Daoism in Western Music, part 1
Music: SFCR Radio Show #9, Daoism in Western Music, part 2
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 