“Every season has its beginning and end;
every age has its changes and transformations.
Happiness and despair follow one another continuously.
Sometimes our views are undermined
but the result may win our consent.

Other times we persist in our erroneous views
and seek to correct the views of others.

This is comparable to a great marsh
where all variety of vegetation is found growing,
or to a great mountain where the trees and rocks are found
on the same ground, this is called
‘the talk of the villages’.”

Small knowledge said, “Will it be sufficient to call it the tao?”

Comprehensive Understanding replied,
“No.

If we count up all things in the world
there are more than ten thousand.
When we speak of them conventionally as ‘ten thousand things,’
we use the term to designate a large number of things.
Similarly ‘heaven and earth’ designate the greatest physical form.
‘Yin’ and ‘yang’ refer to the greatest of all elemental forces.

The ‘tao’ refers to what is common to them.
As they are great, to designate them
with the ‘tao’ and refer to them as ‘the great tao’
is appropriate.

But how can there be a comparison between the tao
and ‘the talk of the villages’?
That would be comparable
to calling a dog and a horse by the same name

when the differences are so evident.”

Zhuangzi, trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Gurong, Chapter 25 Zeyang

Another Monday. A late winter day guaranteed to afford a bit more light than yesterday. Spring is anticipated. Change, transformation is what we take account of. Language is a human attempt to track change. Sentient creatures are aware of change. Maybe even the insentient, such as rocks, or consider a molecule of salt? What would such a registry of change amount to? And is there a common give and take, a reciprocal receipt between the insentient, of change? That is fluctuation in the ebb and flow of molecular vibration (heat) or of the impact of external wave moments (sound) communicated at a level so rudimentary the knowledge is undiscovered, so far? Such speculations lead me to the edge of language.

Zhuangzi recognizes the use of language as “village talk’. Village talk takes place on many levels, from the papers presented by respected academics at a conference of their peers, to a conversation between a customer and the Jewel produce-man about the price of avocados. Village talk, high and low. Attempts to make sense of change.

Once upon a time, as a kid raised in a small southern town this made sense to me. At the time it seemed what these words meant were ultimately important: 

…one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

…one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God, etc., etc..

That is an excerpt from the Nicene Creed. Many continue to align life with what a priest or preacher has opined about those words from 381 AD. 

Then there’s a seeming different manner-of-speaking, the language game of alchemy. I received this interesting email from a friend a few days ago:

AI Isn’t the Future: It’s Medieval Alchemy

The core thesis of this material is that Artificial Intelligence—specifically Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—is less a revolutionary “future” technology and more a modern iteration of medieval alchemy. The author draws parallels between the “Black Box” of neural networks and the secretive, divine-focused experiments of natural philosophers. By examining the personalities of tech leaders like Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) through the lens of figures like Paracelsus and Roger Bacon, the narrative suggests that our quest for “generative science” is the latest attempt to find the “Philosopher’s Stone”—a singular fix for the human condition.

If you are tempted to think to yourself WTF, orthodox Christianity, Alchemy and AI rubbing elbows, you have company. My initial response was precisely that! 

But, wait, wait! That’s all ‘village-talk’ isn’t it? Important as far as life together in our village goes.

But there remains the great tao, a wordless pointing to what is common to all of our viewpoints.