Tao Te Ching
Tao Te Ching
Chapter 4The Father of All Things
Chapter 4
The Tao is like an empty bowl,
Used but never used up.
Those who use it never become full again.
And deep – the source of the ten thousand things.
It blunts sharp edges,
Unties all tangles,
Softens all glare.
One with the dust,
It unites the world into one whole.
It’s like a deep pool that never dries up,
Hidden deep but always here.
Was it too the child of something else?
Or the common ancestor of all,
The father of all things?
Commentary
“Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, ‘I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.’”
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“Balance is the beginning of the Way. Emptiness is the heart of the way.”
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“Whoever sees the nature of one thing sees the nature of everything because the emptiness of one thing is the emptiness of everything.”
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“Those who seek the Tao seek to return to emptiness and nothingness. When something is done, something is left out. When nothing is done, nothing is not done.”
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“In the interlaced net of principle and phenomena, true emptiness appears. Shining to obliterate the fundamental delusion.”
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“‘Empty’ means ‘empty like a bowl.’ The Tao is essentially empty and people who use it should be empty too. To be full is contrary to the Tao. ‘Deep’ means ‘what cannot be measured.’”
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“The word ‘ch’an, ‘dust,’ is a Buddhist term which means ‘the worry of worldliness’.”
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“For me whatever is in the atoms and molecules is in the universe. I believe in the saying that what is in the microcosm of one’s self is reflected in the macrocosm.”
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“As soon as you're alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you don't get there, what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is.”
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“From emptiness, everything comes out. One whole body of water, or one whole mind, is emptiness. When we reach this understanding we find true meaning to our life.”
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“passages such as this one… offer what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.”
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“The path to true happiness is the same whoever, whenever, or wherever you are.”
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“When we draw down the power and depth of vastness into a single perception, then we are discovering and invoking magic.”
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“For such an enigmatic verse, there are surprisingly few variants… I’ve read them as an explanation of the Tao’s ancestral status, which makes kin of us all.”
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Comments (1)
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
This is much longer than most other translations. In some chapters, the various translations are very similar; but in this one, the renditions are very different from each other. Rather than only choosing one out of many good ones, we’ve included several different versions of the same text.
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