Use conventional wisdom to rule a country,
Use deception to win a war
But only non-action, not meddling, letting go, doing nothing …
Will win your world.
See how this is true by watching how:
The more laws and prohibitions,
The poorer the people;
The more experts,
The more confusion;
The more weapons,
The more trouble;
The more clever the schemes,
The more people lose;
The louder the call for law and order,
The more thieves and con artists.
For these reasons wise leaders
Don’t meddle and the people transform themselves;
Don’t preach and the people naturally improve themselves;
Don’t create new economic schemes and the people prosper on their own;
Don’t chase ambitious goals and the people return to a good and simple life.
“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.”
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“Most problems, if you give them enough time and space, will eventually wear themselves out.”
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“Perfect truthfulness though unmoving, creates change; though taking no action, brings about completion; though making no display, becomes manifest.”
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“Sail with the stream, and follow fortune’s tack, steer not your ship of life against the tide, since chance must guide thy course.”
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“Where you find the laws most numerous, there you will find also the greatest injustice.”
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“Amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.”
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“A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”
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“Prohibitions are intended to put an end to poverty, and yet the people become poorer. Tools are intended to strengthen the country, and yet the country becomes weaker and more chaotic. This is due to cultivating the branches instead of the roots.”
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“Where conscious effort and striving are present, the Buddha is absent.”
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“Don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest.”
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“Don’t control what you experience. Just rest in how things are.”
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“Directness can be used in governing, but nowhere else. Deception can be used in warfare, but that is all. Only those who practice non-action are fit to rule the world.”
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“In the end, you should know that there is nothing else to do like a shepherd whose flocks have been driven off by his enemies.”
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“This is the time and place to leap beyond the ten thousand emotional entanglements of innumerable kalpas. One contemplation of ten thousand years finally goes beyond all the transitory, and you emerge with spontaneity.”
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“All of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.”
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“All works which come from within us are spontaneous… pleasant, whereas all those works which arise due to an external cause are constraining and enslaving. If these works did not arise due to something outside us they would not happen at all, and therefore they are constraining, enslaving and bitter.”
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“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
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“Their utter honesty enables others to see. Hence they cannot be abandoned. They are content and free of desires. Hence they cannot be helped. They dwell beyond life and death. Hence they cannot be harmed.”
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“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.”
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“intelligence… lets the first impulse pass by and waits for the second, or even the third.”
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“Enlightened awareness is within each one of us, right at this moment… without effort rest naturally as the Unborn Mind, as a living Buddha.”
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“Whenever we endeavor to bring about our own perfection, or that of others, by our own efforts, the result is simply imperfection.”
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“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
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“Neither trust, nor contend, lay wagers, nor lend; and you’ll have peace until your life's end.”
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“One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.”
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“Make yourself at home in the natural state of pure presence, just being, not doing anything in particular.”
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“Others will enjoy the wealth we as misers kept. Even our body we hold so dear will be left behind.”
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“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.”
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“I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men.”
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“The term wu, ‘non-existence,’ is not annihilation but denotes absence of concrete particularity or of materiality.”
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“All good men are Anarchists… all just men are Anarchists. Jesus was an Anarchist.”
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“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
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“Those who cannot renounce attachment to the results of their work are far from the path.”
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“What did these people do in order to achieve the progress that freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing (wu wei), but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself as taught by Meister Eckhart, became a key to me with which I was able to open the door to the ‘Way.’”
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“Some of us think holding on makes us strong but sometimes it is letting go.”
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“Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.”
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“Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.”
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“One must have an extraordinary sense of energy which has no cause, which has no motive, which has the capacity to be utterly quiet, and this very quietness has its own explosive quality.”
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“I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. she perfumed my planet and lit up my life.”
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“But pretense was impossible. There was a quality in the air of Shangri-La that forbade one the effort of counterfeit emotion.”
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“When you try to do something, you lose it because you are concentrated on one out of 1000 hands - you lose 999.”
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“Since all things are naked, clear and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.”
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“Come into my parlor said the spider to the specialist.”
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“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.”
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“You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more.”
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“I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped them.”
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“wei wu wei – not a statement susceptible to logical interpretation, or even to syntactical translation into English; but it’s a concept that transforms thought radically, that changes minds.”
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“It’s not a matter of transmitting teachings, but of working unbounded, unhindered, free from traditions, directly with whatever you have.”
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“If as Sun Tzu says, ‘Deception is the art of war,’ it follows that being genuine and authentic is the art of peace.”
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“this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.”
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“when we do let go, how wonderful. We discover that the darkness is actually full of light.”
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“The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusion that we draw must be let go.”
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“It’s actually not trying to do anything at all (even relax). That’s the whole point.”
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“It’s okay. Everything is okay… Don’t rush; everything is going to be okay… Just cool it. You don’t have to do a complete job, all at once. If you go too far, if you are too hungry, you could become a cosmic monster. That message is very courageous, but very few people have the courage to say that.”
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“Just fully being skillful involves total lack of inhibition. We are not afraid to be. We are not afraid to live… like a tiger in the jungle.”
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“We are lured by the expectation that… one day we will reach ‘happily ever after’ … We believe our grand performance is yet to come, so we do not live for today.”
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“People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.”
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“Just to simply relax and rest in your own natural state is all that you need to do.”
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