Tao Te Ching

surface feelings

I barely know anything about Taoism. All I know is that the Tao Te Ching, in any translation, calms me. It touches and holds me. It echoes my own feelings. Not talking spiritually or anything. Just emotionally, outside context.

From what I’ve read, nobody knows if Lao Tzu was a real person. This book could be an amalgam of different people’s thoughts and ideas, put together under one name. It feels like it came from one person, though. A person with flaws like anyone else. There’s no such thing as perfect writing. As elegant and simple as the Tao Te Ching is, all its sentences are still human.

Lao Tzu isn’t just saying things; Lao Tzu is trying to say things, like everyone else. Every translator, from Arthur Waley to Ursula K. Le Guin, phrases his words in different ways, because there’s no perfect way to express this book’s images and feelings.

So many dense academic text books over-explain life’s contradictions in rough, granular detail, while the Tao Te Ching expresses them smoothly. But its words are never too smooth. Reading it, you get the feeling that all these thoughts could be expressed even simpler. Does everything have to be perfectly simple and smooth? No, because that’s impossible. But I appreciate the effort taken to be simple and smooth. Way more considerate than a book filled with roundabout sentences, tripping over itself to say everything.

I’m not looking for some perfect book of wisdom that tells me everything. I’m not looking for something that will make me feel smart. I’m just looking for something that resonates. And when I read what the Tao Te Ching has to say about darkness, light, closeness, distance, etc., I feel a resonance.

Not just resonance. Also warmth. It’s deep and shallow.