Chapter 44

Commentary::

This chapter makes a simple presentation of Laozi’s wuweidao and non-duality’s avoidance of extremes. It is a chapter that inspired many of the mandates and precepts of the Tianshidao Xiang Er commentary. It has been the custom of Chinese and foreign commentators to make this chapter about morality and even politics and economics, but there is also View and conduct teaching here for Laozi’s Daoist cultivation/ meditation.

We are asked, “What is more important, our reputation or our shen?” The term used here for reputation may be understood in many ways. It is something like what other people think of you, but it is also about what you think of your-self, the hardened memories that make up your personal story. How do these stories gain value and importance? How do they compare with our “shen” or countenance? How do they compare with our basic capacity to experience life? Do these stories¹ foster clarity or prejudice? Even a casual investigation renders “reputation” as flimsy, fickle, and of little true value. So should we devote our life to reputation, or embrace life’s nature (shen)?

What is more valuable, body or wealth? The term translated here as “body” means our very embodiment, anatomy and physiology in the traditional Daoist sense. We might also say “inner or outer wealth.” This term “body” is very hard to evaluate, as it is the root of all value when understood properly.

Once we have valuables we might ask, “Which is most worrying, gain or loss?” If you examine our embodiment and possessions as a kind of treasury, we can immediately develop uncertainty and insecurity. When will they be lost? How will I acquire more wealth, recover from illness, when will I die?

This whole first section asks questions about value: What has value, and what does value actually mean? Of course, answers to the questions are less important than the queries themselves. If there is any abiding value, where is it found?

These questions, unanswered, define the practice of zuowang. When we practice zuowang, we rest in the undistracted natural condition, unconcerned with stories, names, acquiring, or losing. In the natural condition, our relative condition does not die; we simply experience it without compulsive anxiousness.

Having established this, Laozi warns us about trailing off into extremes. What are the trance-states that can be mistaken for zuowang? It is not zuowang to practice excess frugality (the attempt to strictly avoid thoughts or feelings) because it leads to squandering waste. The natural condition does not require struggling, effort, or renunciation of our ordinary experience; in fact, our so-called “ordinary experience” is the grist for naturalness. Avoiding thoughts or feelings, warns Laozi, leads to the preponderance of thoughts and the dramatic explosion of feelings. Excessive restrictions mislead us to the notion that freedom (naturalness) is distant, resultant, and ultimately unattainable. This hold-back-and-explode pattern is the antithesis of wuweidao.

In the practice of zuowang and its related hygiene (diet, qigong, etc.), hoarding² leads to paranoia and theft. If we practice with any sense of gain, improvement, or power, we invite a sense of loss and paranoia and cannot enjoy the splendor in which we naturally find ourselves.

Where is this splendor? It is found in ziran-naturalness, or simply the way-things-are-of-themselves. When de and Dao embrace one another, what we have, what we do, and what we are are all revealed as indistinct. We directly experience wuwei.

Laozi simply suggests to be content with what you have and what you are, as it guards against confusion. What we do, have, and are, in reality, are not distinct. Wuweidao is thus to cease with sufficiency, which, in turn, avoids (qi/ jing) exhaustion. Naturalness is easily found where sufficiency remains. Wuwei Adepts are those who practice “contentment and sufficiency” and therefore long endure, living out their allotted years.

This chapter, like several others, gently suggests that a non-dual path does not offer refuge in extremes. The teaching and methods avoid the notions of great value and nihilism. Likewise, the wuwei adept, in conduct and formal meditation, avoids the efforts and struggles of transcendence and hopelessness.

Footnotes::

1. reputation
2. qi/jing