Digging Your Own Well: Part Twenty Three

Sentimentality

1. Heaven and earth are not humane (jen),
They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (ch'u kou).
The sage is not humane (jen),
He treats the hundred families as straw dogs (ch'u kou). 

2. Between heaven and earth,
How like a bellows (t'o yo) it is!
Empty and yet inexhaustible,
Moving and yet it pours out ever more. 

3. By many words one's reckoning (shu) is exhausted.
It is better to abide by the center (shou chung).

(Chapter Five, Laozi, Ellen Chen trans.)

“Jen” is a key Confucian virtue that suggests that people have an innate desire or drive to help one another. While not universally expressed, it is something that is potentially in all human beings if they try. Usually this word is translated as “sentimental” but Chen has translated it as “humane”. This is an important point, because the chapter becomes a lot easier to take if you think of it as a rejection of saccharine sentimentality. It is much harsher than that, however, Laozi is saying that the universe is totally indifferent to human suffering. It might be that some, or even all, people have jen, but the world certainly doesn't.

 

He implies this by saying that every creature (ie “the ten thousand beings”), every human being (“the hundred families”) are just “straw dogs”. Straw dogs were cheap representations of the animals that used to be used as sacrifices during religious rituals. (They were the same as the “Hell Money” that you can find in any Chinese grocery and which is burned as a sacrifice during various festivals.) Straw dogs are simply worthless objects that are destroyed in the place of things that are actually worth too much to be wasted.

 

Contrast this Daoist statement with the lyrics of this Christian hymn I learned as a young boy.

God sees the little sparrow fall,
It meets His tender view;
If God so loves the little birds,
I know He loves me, too.

Christianity is sentimental. It believes that there is a great God in heaven that cares deeply about what happens to each and every human being that has ever lived. The Christian universe is supposed to be humane.

 

The question is, which point of view makes the most sense?

...........

 

Shortly after the terror attacks at the World Trade Centre I was invited to take part in a panel discussion at a private school. There were a lot of people present---a Cabinet minister, a representative of the Israeli government, a Roman Catholic priest, etc. I was appalled by the way these “responsible”, “mainstream” people acted. To a one, they expressed an extremely emotional, freaked-out response to the 9/11 massacre. There was no attempt to try and put any of it into a context, to suggest that we shouldn't stumble around like enraged bears---creating more violence and evil in the world. I was the lone voice trying to put the attacks into an objective perspective in order to calm people's emotions. I said that bad as the attack was, the casualties would have been considered a quiet day in WWII---which went on for about six years! I also said that we have to remember that each and everyone of us is going to die and that we shouldn't be so emotionally freaked out by something like this. I ended by reading out the above passage from the Laozi.

 

I've spent a lot of time thinking about that event as I watch the horrors that have been inflicted on the world by the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and the never-ending “war on terror”. Why was I the only voice suggesting moderation? I would suggest that it is because these other people were working through a false understanding of life. They believed in the words of that child's hymn that I learned at Sunday school. They literally believed that “Jesus loves them”.¹

 

Of course, none of them would parrot that little song. Some of them weren't even nominal Christians. But I suspect that if you pressed them, they would all have ultimately come up with some expression that the universe is, or at least in some metaphysical ways should be, “fair”. The emotional response that these “leaders” all manifested came from the cognitive dissonance that stomped with leaden feet into their lives on 9/11. The world isn't “fair”---your day can start with a proper breakfast, you can kiss your spouse, you can line up all your career “ducks in a row”, and out of nowhere some lunatic will fly an airplane into your building and incinerate you with jet fuel.

 

Have a nice day!

..........

 

For Laozi it isn't just that you can have everything going for you and if you are unlucky bad things happen. No, it's worse than that, it is inevitable that bad things happen. Look at the second stanza of Chapter Five:

“Between heaven and earth,
How like a bellows (t'o yo) it is!”

Who exists between heaven and earth? People do! And where is a bellows used? In the forge of a blacksmith. Laozi is suggesting that people's lives are like the fuel in a blacksmith's forge. We are one of the raw materials of existence that gets burned up and consumed in the Dao process. This analogy fits perfectly as straw dogs get burned in a fire during the ritual they serve. And, as I told those school children, whether or not you get crushed, incinerated, or, jump to your death during a terrorist attack---you are still going to die no matter what. Indeed, while I was saying this, my eyes focused on a bald little boy who I suspected had cancer and was going through chemo therapy. How is dying of terminal cancer better than being smashed by a bunch of Islamo-Fascists?

 

We are all straw dogs.

 

And yet, there is a little bit of an answer to the bleakness of this passage.

“Empty and yet inexhaustible,
Moving and yet it pours out ever more.”

The Dao exists and maybe it has a purpose even if it is indifferent to our personal desires. It is possible to build a life where one actually puts an ideal ahead of yourself---even if many people think that this is completely impossible. Stoics used to believe that Virtue is its own reward. This credo says that you don't “do the right thing” because you expect a reward---even if it is just a good feeling about yourself---but simply because it is the thing to do. In same way, I understand that pre-Christian Norsemen believed that courage was an ultimate virtue. You weren't courageous because it would make you a great warrior, but just because it was inherently the thing to be. Scientists also derive real meaning and purpose in their lives simply based on the quest for knowledge---not so they can patent some invention and make money or get a Nobel prize---but just because it is the thing to do. In much the same way, Daoists identify and appreciate the amazing process of existence that constantly transforms everything---plants, animals, rocks, people, energy, etc---into something else. Even strawdogs give off smoke and ashes that feed the plants, and, heat to warm the hands. For Daoists that is enough.

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1My one-time boss had a bumpersticker on his desk that read “Jesus loves you. But I still think you're an asshole.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!