What I teach is very easy to understand
Very easy to use.
Nobody in the world understands it or uses it.
What I teach follows an ancestry
Just as the affairs of people obey a sovereign. 5
Truly
Those who don’t know this, don’t know me.
Those who know me are few.
Those who follow me become treasured.
Therefore 10
Sages appear plain, all their jewels concealed.
***
NOTES
line 3: See also poem 78, line 7.
COMMENTARY
The first-person voice is sustained throughout most of poem 70, and Laozi’s sense of personal loss is present in the first three lines – a sad truth offered as a third-person fact in poem 78: Nobody knows how to use it. Note the emphasis in both on knowing how to use the reality of Dao. As discussed in the Introduction section IV.3, non-action is not inaction; you’re not doing not doing until you’ve removed your ego from what you’re doing, and ego is the sovereign ruling most everyone’s affairs. But when Laozi claims an ancestry for what he’s teaching, he’s also reminding us that what he’s teaching works. Not many know that, but when you do as he does, however modest you may appear, you are transformed – and thus the whole world finds its treasure in you, as poem 56 tells us.
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 