Where the great Dao is abandoned
You’ll hear talk of humaneness and duty.
Where cleverness and strategies appear
You’ll witness great hypocrisies.
Where disharmony wounds families 5
You’ll be commanded to honor your parents.
Where confusion and contention grip the state
You’ll find a class of public servants.
***
NOTES
line 2, humaneness and duty: Laozi refers here to the Confucian values of ren and yi, respectively. Although supportive of ren in poems 8 and 38, here he observes not only its limitations, as he does in poem 5, but also its connectedness to yi – that the dutifulness Confucianism imposes upon its followers includes their duty to behave in a humane manner. This linkage also appears in poem 19. See poem 38 for a more thorough commentary on Confucian values.
line 6: More literally, “There is filial piety.” Laozi is here referring to another Confucian imperative – although I have taken the liberty of employing a biblical allusion in my wording. See poem 19 for the Daoist response.
line 8: More literally, “Patriotic ministers appear.”
COMMENTARY
Poem 18 is an eight-line rant against contrivance. Which is worth ranting about, because once we stop being natural, we become obliged to make an ethic out of showing compassion and being responsible. The result is to take things that must be natural within us, if we are to survive as a species, and which must be available to us always, with no obstructions of education or ethics or faith, and replace them with ideas – things that are intellectual and artificial, which then must be either accepted or imposed.
Contrivance also rules business, where strategizing goes on in every corporate boardroom, invariably bringing all involved to dishonesty. Contrivance corrupts the family as well, with its members jockeying for power so viciously that they require a deity ordering them to show respect. And when our spiritual and professional and family lives are awry, the state too will be confused and contentious, mired in its own contrivances. The state’s solution, one just as contrived as the ethics and hypocrisies and commandments already derided, is to generate an entire class of politicians and bureaucrats, all invested in maintaining themselves. What could possibly go wrong?
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 