Your name or yourself, which is more dear to you?
Yourself or your stuff, which means more to you?
You gain or you lose, which hurts you more?
Too much love must result in too much waste.
Constant hoarding must result in huge loss. 5
Knowing sufficiency, you cannot be shamed.
Knowing when to stop, you cannot be harmed.
This is how you endure forever.
***
NOTES
line 7: This line also appears, with slight modification, in poem 32.
COMMENTARY
Naming, a recurring theme in the Dao De Jing, is referenced in line 1 of this poem, and its implied equivalent is the stuff of line 2. Laozi sees both as externals that serve as obstacles to the self, competing with you and confusing the issue when it comes to defining who you are. So it’s a fair call for him to ask if obtaining harms you worse than loss does. His questions that open poem 44 lead him to the distortions of love – too much love of another, which costs you everything, or too much self-love, which must accumulate to maintain reassurance. Waste and loss can be the only results of such distortions. You define yourself by knowing what you don’t need. And if the last line is indeed a reference to immortality (see Introduction section IV.6), it is also a reminder that to depend on material things is to depend on ephemera, and that’s no formula for endurance.
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 