What is softest of all
Mashes away
What is hardest of all.
What is devoid of form
Enters into 5
What is devoid of space.
From this I learn the usefulness of non-action
Of teaching without words
Of deeds without action.
Few in the world put this to work. 10
***
NOTES
line 1: Water, an idea made explicit in the opening of poem 78. Poems 8 and 32 also compare Dao to water.
COMMENTARY
Poem 43 employs a canny literary device: By not naming water or stone, Laozi obliges us to imagine these commonplace things; from there we can imagine things that have no physical existence, namely formlessness and spacelessness. The movement from the material to the non-material leads directly to non-action, what Laozi is calling deeds without action. In Daoist thought, non-action is fundamental to getting your act together (see Introduction section IV.3). And if Laozi here can detect but a few who use non-action, that’s still better than the more despairing evaluations of poems 70 and 78, where the few have become none.
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 