Does The Universe Care?: Tao Te Ching 5
Stacie walked past this while struggling to figure out the nature of this chapter.
The cosmos is unbiased,
treating all living things
like sidewalk chalk drawings.
The sage is unbiased,
treating all people
like sidewalk chalk drawings.
The atmosphere is like a bellows.
Wind blows
through seeming emptiness.
It stokes fires,
but never runs out of breath.
Yet when blowhards talk,
everyone gets exhausted.
It’s better to embrace silence.
This was by far the most difficult chapter for us to make sense of, let alone interpret. Fortunately, we ended our wrestling with these lines just as the chapter itself ends: by letting the storms pass and resting in silence.
The problem for us was arguably a very human problem: why do decent people suffer while the wicked prosper. This chapter seems to suggest that heaven, the universe, or God does not care about the myriad mortal creatures who are born and die painfully in this world. Many of the existing translations talk of the Tao being unconcerned, uncaring, or even unkind. At first, this seemed to represent one of the key differences between Eastern philosophies that do not involve a providential God (that is, a deity who is personal and intervenes). But as we sat with it, we saw a more profound meaning in both this chapter and also the Christian tradition with which we grew up.
The original metaphor for the first stanza was the term “straw dogs.” These were handcrafted ceremonial animal figures—mostly dogs but possibly other critters—used for ancient Chinese rituals. They were loved for a moment, perhaps. They were a brief expression of a feeling, twisted from organic material into an image of something that meant something, but then was tossed into flame. One might see straw dogs blowing about after a festival.
It’s not that the straw dogs were despised. It’s that their role was temporary. They were an ephemeral expression of some meaningful thing, but only at a precise time. And like beads on a Bourbon Street morning, these straw dogs were not worth as much at dawn day as they were at midnight . The point, for Lao Tzu, is that we live in a world that involves temporality. We aren’t puppets on strings and the universe deals us apparently random hands.
Without a reference to an intervening God, what else is there to soothe our anxieties in the face of uncertainty? In religious language, a common answer is karma, popularly the idea that every bad thing that happens to a person in this life is the result of something they did wrong in this or a past life. While close-range karma is often a real phenomenon in daily life, as in when drinking too much leads to a morning hangover, it is definitely not always true, as when people are born into poverty.
Even in the West these days, especially in New Age conversations, we encounter the idea that we attract the negative or positive energy that affects our lives. But Lao Tzu sets us free from this. As far as day to day life is concerned, our lives involve both the joyful excitement and worried anxiety that comes with not knowing for sure what the future holds.
The Tao Te Ching counters this sort of thinking with a reminder to surf the ripple of our current moment, even as it respects the law of cause and effect. Live in the now, is the perennial message. But respect the natural flow of things is the bass line below that melody.
Nonetheless, there is an “anti'-wisdom” in this chapter that is also found within Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. For instance, the whole book of Job rejects the idea that suffering befalls a person because of some grievous thing they’ve done. Jesus says in Matthew 5:45 that the sun shines and the rain falls on the just and unjust alike. This is why Jesus teaches us not to fret about the past nor worry about tomorrow (Matt. 6:25-34).
Recognizing that folks don’t get exactly what they deserve is a very important teaching if we care about justice. We humans have a tendency to deal with troubling news by appealing to the just world fallacy. This fallacy leads us to believe, wrongly, that whenever something good happens to us it is because we deserve it, but that when something bad happens, it is our fault. There are countless ways in which this fallacy has long term negative effects in our lives, despite the temporary relief it may offer. One of the main blessings of rejecting the fallacy is realizing that when painful events befall you, it isn’t as if God is cursing you or that you deserve whatever it is you are suffering through.
Through all this chatter, we come to realize that we can let go of chatter. The lesson, really, is that we can focus on the idea that we don’t have to judge the comings and goings of this life. We can observe them. We can acknowledge them. We can celebrate them. But we don’t need to cling too tightly to them. We can enjoy the gifts that life brings our way, especially the little things that slip by through minnows in a stream.
For this reason, instead of using the literal concept of “straw dogs,” which is definitely the way to go if you want a precise translation, we took the poetic liberty of substituting “chalk drawings.” We came to this idea as we were walking our dog along a sidewalk and came across a lone child’s shoe and a beautiful pastel depiction of flowers near a bench. It was a beautiful sunny day but we knew that rains were coming that evening. We imagined that there was a nice day near the park for a family with a young daughter. Perhaps there was a nice pause from the hectic day, and during that pause a loving mother watched her daughter draw a garden onto concrete. That moment, if mom was paying attention, had the value of eternity. It might be a moment she will recall in her dying days as one of her most treasured moments. But no one was worried that the rain was going to wash away the manifestation.