Nothing in the world is as weak and yielding as water
Yet when it comes to wrecking what is hard and unyielding
Nothing does the job better and nothing can replace it.
The weak overcome the hard.
The yielding overcome the unyielding. 5
Everybody knows this is true.
Nobody knows how to use it.
Therefore
The Sage tells us:
If you can take on yourself the nation’s dishonor 10
We call this mastery of the shrine.
If you can take on yourself the nation’s disaster
We call this rulership of the world.
The truth sounds like a paradox.
***
NOTES
lines 1–3: Laozi here makes explicit the reference to water which begins poem 43.
lines 4 and 5: These two lines are condensed into one in poem 36.
COMMENTARY
There’s almost a Greatest Hits quality to the opening of poem 78, as implied in the above notes to the first five lines. That’s why you’re brought up short by lines 6 and 7 – Laozi knows that even his Greatest Hits have yet to chart. He has gone from a voice in the wilderness to the voice of a classic, yet it’s all unused because so few of us want our lives to change. Say what you will about suffering, at least it’s familiar – and has its attendant pleasures too – whereas reframing reality and altering your relationship with your own self, that’s scary. The problem is a lack of understanding of non-action (see Introduction section IV.3). If you do not doing, as Sages do, you have the inner openness and outer strength that can shoulder responsibility for your nation’s failings and calamities, making you fit to lead and be trusted with the world – which poem 29 tells us is a vessel of Shen and hence a shrine.
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 