How to Be Useless
Respectfully, I spent a few years fascinated with Taoism and quite a bit of time studying it and reckon you probably get some wrong impressions from this article.<p>The challenge in learning from the Taoist writers is that almost no one can read their original works directly any more — the writing was so long ago that most modern-day Chinese people can&#x27;t read it directly from Ancient Chinese without translating into modern first. The language has evolved.<p>That&#x27;s before even getting into the challenge of learning in English or another language, since the works tend to have lots of metaphors and idioms and poetic language in them.<p>In my case, I had a really cool opportunity to go through over a dozen translations of the Taoteching with copies of the translation from ancient Chinese into modern Chinese and a translator&#x27;s attempt at an English translation with a Chinese friend who is a scholar of linguistics. It was really fun and insightful.<p>That all said, I think Rosenthal&#x27;s &quot;The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction&quot; is a wonderful starting place.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw&#x2F;FULLTEXT&#x2F;JR-AN&#x2F;an142304.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw&#x2F;FULLTEXT&#x2F;JR-AN&#x2F;an142304.pdf</a><p>Rosenthal takes the very terse, poetic, and metaphorical lines of Laozi and turns them into extended prose while keeping a lot of the aesthetics. Like so:<p>&gt; <i>THE TAO AND ITS NAME</i><p>&gt; <i>1. Naming things enables us to differentiate between them, but names are words, and words easily give rise to confusion. They do not replace the thing or direct experience of the thing which they name, but only represent or describe it.</i><p>(And then it goes deeper into explaining on that point.)<p>At least in Rosenthal&#x27;s case, his take is quite different than the professors who wrote this article:<p>&gt; <i>KNOWLEDGE OF &#x27;THE TAO&#x27;, AND EXPERIENCE OF THE TAO.</i><p>&gt; <i>There is a way in which we may conduct our lives without regrets, and in such a manner as assists in developing and realizing our individual potential, without harming others, or inhibiting the realization of their potential, and which is beneficial to a healthy society.</i><p>&gt; <i>Such a way of life may of course be conducted without a name, and without description, but in order that others may know of it, and so as to distinguish it from other ways in which life may be conducted, we give it a name, and use words to describe it.</i><p>And then, critically —<p>&gt; <i>2. LETTING GO OF OPPOSITES.</i><p>&gt; <i>It is the nature of the ordinary person, the person who is not yet at one with the Tao, to compare the manifestations of the natural qualities possessed by things. Such a person tries to learn of such qualities by distinguishing between their manifestations, and so learns only of their comparative manifestations.</i><p>&gt; <i>So it is that the ordinary person might consider one thing beautiful when compared with another which he considers to be ugly; one thing skillfully made compared with another which he considers badly made. He knows of what he has as a result of knowing what he does not have, and of that which he considers easy through that which he considers difficult. He considers one thing long by comparing it with another thing which he considers short; one thing high and another low. He knows of noise through silence and of silence through noise, and learns of that which leads through that which follows.</i><p>&gt; <i>When such comparisons are made by a sage, that is a person who is in harmony with the Tao, that person is aware of making a judgement, and that judgements are relative to the person who makes them, and to the situation in which they are made, as much as they are relative to that which is judged.</i><p>The interaction and fusion of Taoist and various other Chinese thought with Buddhism, attributed typically to Boddhidharma traveling from India to China, became the foundation of Chan Buddhism in China and later Zen Buddhism in Japan.<p>I reckon most scholars and practitioners from the tradition wouldn&#x27;t accept the useful&#x2F;useless distinction as correct or as &quot;Follow[ing] the Daoist way&quot; - like, some nice ideas in the article, but both a false dichotomy and unfortunate dualism there.