Dark of the Moon

This crazy election week is a good time to be thinking about the Tao Te Ching.

The Tao is a classic of early Chinese spirituality , an elusive, lyrical meditation on how to live in dark and dangerous times. Unlike Confucian thinking, which emphasizes social order (with its reliance on law, stability, and hierarchy), the Tao emphasizes the individual, the transitory, and the small. It praises the darkness—even “the dark beyond the dark,” which Lao-Tzu calls “the door to all beginnings.” The Tao is all about flowing, about adapting to inevitable change. It reminds us that, just as the moon waxes and wanes, so do kingdoms and cultures. To live a balanced life, we have to learn how to embrace the dark phase of the moon.

The last time I read the Tao Te Ching, I was in California in the 80s, for grad school. My studies were rooted in medieval Europe, but, like a lot of people, I flirted with Eastern ideas and practices, too. (They were in the air back then.) The Eastern and Western texts didn’t feel to me as dissonant as you might think. Though Midwestern middle-class America had given me stable ground for growing up, its values were feeling stale by then. I wanted alternatives—something with more energy and spice. I wanted to explore. Like many others, I wanted to know what it was like to live differently than I’d lived growing up. For some people I knew, that meant taking up a Zen practice or studying anthropology. For me, it meant studying medieval spiritual narratives, but it also meant reading science fiction. (Ursula LeGuin, who loved the Tao, was a staple.)  I pondered the spiritualities and literatures of past and imagined cultures side by side. I wasn’t looking for a belief system, after all. I was looking for insight. For clues.

That was almost forty years ago, but this fall the Tao crossed my path again. Two friends announced that they intended to take an online class on it, so I followed their lead. Sadly, the class was a bit of a bust: we didn’t get much background information or a coherent interpretation of the poems. Instead, a sweet-natured, disorganized scholar of classical Chinese encouraged a bunch of us newbies to read a good translation of the Tao and bat around some fairly random ideas about it. 

But the Tao itself! That was funny, mystical, thought-provoking, peculiar, and compelling. Attributed to Lao-Tzu (the “Old Master”), the text  may be a compendium of early Taoist poems by various masters. Tradition holds, however, that  it was composed by a sage named Li Tan or Li Er, who served as an archivist for the royal court of Chengzhou sometime between 600 and 400 BCE. At the age of eighty, when he noticed the decline of the capital city, Lao-tzu walked away from his life at court, intending to become a hermit. But as he was leaving the city, a sentry recognized him and asked him to record his teachings. The Tao Te Ching is supposedly the result.

The word tao means roughly a way (a direction or a path). For Taoists, it means the Way—the current of the universe, the way things are, from atoms to humans. The Way itself lies beyond speech but manifests itself in te, a term that means power, virtue, and/or the inner essence of something. (In the Tao, horses possess it as well as humans. So it doesn’t mean virtue in the sense of following the rules of one’s culture or creed.) In his easy-going discussion of the term, Benjamin Hoff (The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet) notes that the Chinese character for te combines two parts, one meaning “upright heart,” the second meaning “left foot” or “stepping out.” So it signifies something like The Upright Heart that Steps Out or a being’s inner essence in action. (I like the implication that it’s natural for humans to be moral.)

The Tao Te Ching does not preach a religion. It hints at a way of life. It acknowledges public morality and social harmony, but it evokes a way of living that is serene at the heart–private, individual, and quiet. Moral action that is dutiful or rule-bound ranks lower than moral action that arises naturally from one’s character. In the Tao, the wise act like flowing streams, which bring refreshing water to dry places, yet have the power to carve rocks into deep canyons. The wise are modest, acting in accord with the situation without effort or strain (wei wu wei). They “Rule a big country / the way you cook a small fish.” Night alternates with day, the dark new moon precedes and follows the full moon, and leaves tumble down now so that new leaves can grow in the spring. The wise don’t reject these cycles. They work with them.

Part of me is moved by this celebration of the simple and natural. Another part of me says, “Bah humbug.” Or at least, “No, thank you.” I hate the cold and the dark. I hate being small, powerless, and vulnerable. I hate, hate, hate failure and loss. Meanwhile, a third part of me whispers (reluctantly, grudgingly), “Okay. Maybe. I guess I might as well accept the ups and downs of reality. They’re there whether I like them or not.” There are many reminders of this truth, including national elections and growing older. The Tao gently urges us not just to accept this but to embrace it. (I suspect that means embracing my inner bah humbug, too.)   

No matter how this election turns out, there are going to be a lot of defeats and losses. But we can do hard things. We can celebrate small victories and cherish our resilience. We can treat our friends, our families, and even our selves the way we would pan-fry a small fish. Carefully. Delicately, With appreciation and a light touch. Cooked that way, our lives can be delicious–even the parts of us that murmur, Bah humbug.