How Death Can't Touch You (Tao Te Ching 50)
50.
In the course of life and death,
three in ten focus only on getting
what they can from this life.
Three in ten focus on death
and what might be beyond it.
Three in ten try to play life safe
within in the status quo
but actually veer toward death.
Why is this? By worrying too much
about staying alive and consuming life’s treasures,
they never truly live,
yet death catches up with them.
Still, I’ve heard of rare individuals
who’ve mastered the art of living.
They travel nimbly through the world.
They eat local foods abroad.
They visit vibrant cities in developing nations.
Remarkably, these same adventurers
often carry on without getting mugged
or sick, or shaken down by border agents.
How do they pull this off?
They travel confidently and respectfully,
unafraid of death,
knowing that death can’t touch them,
since there is no way
to kill their true self.
Written Reflection
Translators have had difficulty, over the millennia, trying to figure out how to divide out the human population, according to the concept mentioned in this chapter. We like the idea that there are three categories for most of society, each described as three in ten. Then there is one in ten—the sage—who stands apart from the whole thing. Any attempt to identify and explain each of the first three categories seems a bit uncertain. The good news is, whichever way one goes, the big picture remains the same: there are folks who are too worried about holding on to their lives that they end up wasting their lives and meeting death in the end, despite their efforts. There are others who are hedonistically trying to get all they can out of life but then drink death to themselves through self-destructive behavior. There are folks who are too worried about the afterlife that they can’t appreciate the life they’ve got right now. And then there are folks who play it safe and find they too must face the death of their comfortable existence.
From this first vantage point, things look as grim as the Reaper. Yet Lao Tzu holds out a promising idea: that by understanding the Tao, one can become untouchable. How so? By realizing the difference between our true self and our constructed egos—and favoring the former and letting go of the latter—we can evade the same sort of death the Hebrew Bible says came to Adam and Eve in Eden. They didn’t immediately die in the physical sense, but they entered into a way of being in which death became a threat.
This is even more apparent in an old Christian spiritual concept—though surely mystics prior to Christianity said similar things, especially in Pythagorean and Neoplatonic circles—that derive from statements of Jesus, such as “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39 NIV). The best formulation of this principle in Christian circles is captured on an inscription over a door at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mt Athos: “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.”
This has practical advantages in this chapter from the Tao Te Ching. The original said that there were sages who could travel and avoid the horns of rhinos and the claws of tigers. Our playfully serious translation brings in an updated image, drawn of course from our own lives of adventure travel. In such cases, we’ve learned that it is often the case that people who are open to the flow of things tend to fare better than those who are resistant and in tense fear. For example, when dealing with border agents, getting flustered is usually counter-productive. Yet when we let go of our egos—especially the ugly American tourist posture of demanding accommodations —we find we are able to slide through otherwise tricky circumstances. Likewise, we’ve eaten a lot of exotic street food and never got sick (usually this is because the street food usually uses fresh ingredients, cooked up on spot. We have, however got pretty sick from “nice” restaurant food at tourist traps around the world. The point is, by being open to genuine experiences and not prejudging flavors and styles of cooking, we’ve had great, safe fun. By trying to play it safe we’ve been waylaid.
Most importantly, and we know this isn’t foolproof—by relaxing our grips on our egos, we are often able to travel without harm through “unsafe” parts of the world. Again, we know adventurers who’ve remarked about this phenomenon but also got captured for ransom or physically injured. But this practical phenomenon relates to a much greater deathlessness.
The main point, and it’s a helpful one, is that if we stop worrying about the limits of our mortal existence, they start to feel limitless. There is a spiritual place that your enemies can’t touch. They can’t kill it, and therefore they can’t kill the true you. You are invincible in this sense. So hang 10,000 and enjoy the ride, immortal.
