A Single Virtue, A Single Flow
Zhuangzi has said,
“This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine
—he passes judgment on the ten thousand things,
but he/she doesn’t think himself severe;
his bounty extends to ten thousand generations,
but he/she doesn’t think himself benevolent.
He is older than the highest antiquity,
but he/she doesn’t think himself long-lived;
he covers heaven, bears up the earth,
carves and fashions countless forms,
but he/she doesn’t think himself skilled.
This is what is called Heavenly joy.
So it is said, for him who understands Heavenly joy,
Life is the working of Heaven;
death is the transformation of things.
In stillness, he and the yin share a single Virtue;
In motion, he and the yang share a single flow.
With his single mind in repose,
he is king of the world…
Heavenly joy is the mind of the sage
by which he/she shepherds the world.
—Zhuangzi, Heaven and Earth, by Zhuang Zhou, trans. Burton Watson
Would we want to do without ideals? We would not. To be bereft of an ideal, perhaps better said, absent the quest for an ideal, or a better ideal,– one would be lost, without direction. The mind-of-the-Tao is an idealism, respecting the connectivity, the liveliness of all things. Everything is connected to everything else, and there is no outer edge. Nothing is excluded. A sense of what I owe, my indebtedness to the past, and to every flower, tree, and community which presently exists lends a dimension of empathy.
Ego is dissolved, joy is how one engages “the world.”
2 thoughts on “A Single Virtue, A Single Flow”
I wonder if the word “curiosity” could be substituted for “ideal”. Do we not crave information, but only if our curiosity is intact? If we are at point “B” and we desire to arrive at point “A”, is that not an achievable goal? And yet, what if point “A” is not a tangible entity, not a specific geographic place that we can walk or drive to, but has more to do with ethereal musings, doesn’t this mean we must engage in the process of discovery that entails conceptualizing. At least to me, this means that we must first be self-analytical, that we must look inward to understand the “why” of our drive to arrive at point “A”. It seems that this mindfulness is the way to greater understanding of both ourselves the world around us.
I hope this doesn’t sound like too much mumbo-jumbo.
As conditions appear to stand, more mumbo-jumbo is just what is needed.