With Dao guiding your rulers
They won’t wage military actions around the world.
Such affairs tend to backfire.
The fields where armies encamp
Sprout brambles and thorns. 5
The fields after armies leave
Fetch a bad harvest.
The best generals achieve their aim and then they halt.
They achieve without bragging.
They achieve without boasting. 10
They achieve without conceit.
They achieve without lining their pockets!
They achieve without showing strength.
Coming on strong and then aging away.
We call this not Dao. 15
What’s not Dao soon comes to an end.
***
NOTES
line 12: More literally, “(They) achieve and without benefiting!”
lines 14–16: These lines also end poem 55.
COMMENTARY
Poem 30 is a grim reminder that the Dao De Jing emerged during what has come to be known as China’s Warring States Period, over 250 years of instability and violence until the establishment of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, the first dynasty of a united Imperial China. When Laozi denounces Dao-free rulers who get their people embroiled in distant warfare, when he describes the desolation that attends armies, he speaks of things that he has seen and known. Especially striking is his dismay at the officer class – imagine the interminable self-aggrandizing blather that must have been filling people’s ears, for him to scorn generals not just for bragging but for boasting and for conceit as well, in a poetic send-up of their own verbosity! Most importantly, the best generals are successful without making displays of strength – coming on strong just means going away depleted, and neither trajectory follows Dao.
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 