When people come into life
Their bodies are pliant and tender.
After they go into death
Their bodies become hard and rigid.
Living plants have leaves soft and yielding. 5
Once dead, those leaves grow brittle and stiff.
Thus to be hard and rigid is to follow death
To be pliant and tender is to follow life.
Therefore
The army that does not know how to yield, loses 10
Just as the tree that stiffens becomes firewood.
The greater their rigidity
The harder they will fall
While the tender and the pliant
Will be raised above all. 15
***
NOTES
line 10: Poem 69 focuses on the role of yielding in a successful military campaign.
COMMENTARY
Seeing the processes of the natural world, Laozi comes to conclusions about temperament and sensibility in poem 76. Here again, death plays a role, this time as instructor: Observe the hardness and rigidity of those who follow Me. Laozi therefore praises tenderness and pliancy, just as he does in poem 55 when he extols the physicality of an infant. His wisdom here is to extend this principle to a military tactic for victory, the capacity to fall back.
In the 1880s Kano Jigoro developed the Japanese martial art known as judo, which means “the gentle way,” ju do, the do being Dao – the Japanese character is identical to the Chinese. Knowing how to use Dao, Kano employed pliancy to overturn the hard and rigid:
Resisting a more powerful opponent will result in your defeat […] adjusting to and evading your opponent’s attack will cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones.[1]
FOOTNOTE
1. Kano Jigoro, Mind Over Muscle: Writings from the Founder of Judo. Murata Naoki, editor. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2005, pp. 39–40.
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 