Tao Te Ching, Verse 1, Part I

“Tao called Tao is not Tao. Names can name no lasting name.Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth.
Naming: the mother of ten thousand things.Empty of desire, perceive mystery.
Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.These have the same source, but different names.Call them both deep - Deep and again deep: the gateway to all mystery.”
(Tao Te Ching, Verse 1, Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo Translation)

I was first introduced to Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (from here on out, I’ll just call it the tao) some time in”93 in World Lit. I. I was immediately drawn to it because I found it provocatively absurd and paradoxical. I’ve always had an affinity for the absurd and paradoxical. My only explanation for this is that I find life absurd and paradoxical, but this explanation is a bit weak because I loved this sort of thing even as a child. Seemingly it’s just some sort of natural inclination. I suspect that I may have been taking World Lit. I with my friend, Mr. Howell because sometime soon after my first reading of a bit of it, we discussed it. It turns out that Mr. Howell was already familiar with the tao. It seems that he shared my affinity and was much more knowledgeable of the text than I was. This reinforced my affinity and thus, when I saw Stephen Mitchell’s translation in a local book store, I had to buy it. I read it cover to cover and, to be honest, I didn’t get that much out of it, but I liked it. I’d begun to write regularly in a lineless, little, hardbound sketchbook. On the top and bottom of each page, I’d copy interesting quotes that I’d found. I decided to copy the tao, verse by verse into the footers of each page. And over time ,copying and recopying the tao, it started to make sense to me. Around 2001, I decided to devote a journal to the tao. I would copy a verse and then write what it meant to me. There are eighty-one verses and I only managed to get through about half of them before I got busy, lost interest, and eventually lost the journal. In 2008, I began something similar, only this time I wrote the reflections in a daily, group email that I’ve been writing. This time I managed to get through about sixty-four of the verses, but I’ve found that I have other topics that I’d prefer to write about in the emails and most of my friends aren’t very interested in reading about the tao. I figured that as long as no one is reading it, it might as well be in a blog. I do this for my own edification, but I’m hoping that it’ll eventually attract some readers and maybe even generate some discussion, or at least comments. We’ll see. It’s a long road. As I mentioned there are eighty-one verses. My plan is to try to adequately cover one verse a month. At that rate, this is going to take almost seven years, but as Lao Tzu tells us, “ A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” This post is the first of many, many steps. Maybe this time I’ll make it all the way.