Tao Te Ching
Warriors
The first-thought image of “warrior” may most often entail mindless, robot-like automatons marching off to perpetuate atrocities on the weak and helpless. However, the symbol of Warrior can also have a more positive, even inspiring connotation personifying courage, creative strategy, and the strength to cut through confusion, corruption, and the enslavement to religious dogma, political partisanship, and nationalistic chauvinism. As Chögyam Trungpa describes, "Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word 'warrior' is taken from the Tibetan pawo, which literally means 'one who is brave.' Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness."
Quotes (74)
“murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds.”
“Those with outer courage dare to die, those with inner courage dare to live.”
“In their dealings with the world, great people are neither for nor against anyone. They follow whatever is right.”
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“To act without needing a reason… to ride the current of what is – this is the primal virtue.”
“The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs…. A bad bargain is always a ground for repentance.”
“Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.”
“Those who live for themselves fight with others. Those who don’t live for themselves are the refuge of others.”
“Put your trust in the man who feeds the people after finishing his work.”
“The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean, and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended... blue is the smoke of war, white the bones of men.”
“When one family has weapons, it affects its village. When a village has weapons, it affects its state. When a state has weapons, it affects All under Heaven. When All under Heaven have weapons, chaos is preordained.”
“First improve yourself, then reach out to others and to later generations bequeath the noble, pure, and kindly Tao. Thus blessings reach your descendants, virtue grows, beauty lasts, and worship never ends.”
“Whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight, they fight from ambition.”
“Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”
“The chief characteristic of highminded integrity is speaking well of an enemy.”
“Never take things against the grain… Everything has a smooth and a seamy side. The best of weapons wounds if taken by the blade, while the enemy’s spear may be our best protection if taken by the staff.”
“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.”
“Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. For these reasons, the trade of a soldier is held the most honorable of all others; because a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species—who have never offended him,—as possibly he can.”
“A million drilled assassins go from one end of Europe to the other murdering and robbing with discipline in order to earn their bread, because there is no more honest occupation”
“Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”
“Of Caesar’s crime from him to Constantine
And Gregory and John and men divine
Spread the plague of blood and gold abroad,
Who rose like shadows between Man and god”
“Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.”
“A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—approving of some and disapproving of others... I ought or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.”
“I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”
“A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.”
“that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
“And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.”
“by whatever name men may all murder—murder always remains murder and a criminal and shameful thing... we must stop seeing as something else what we call now service of country, heroism of war, military glory, and patriotism. We must learn to see these as they really are—the naked, criminal business of murder”
“Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War… He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.”
“The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is—a mob; the don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass”
“Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War… He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.”
“The eternal forces of truth always work in the individual and immediately in an unsuccessful way, underdogs always until history comes—after they are long dead—and puts them on the top.”
“The true basis of morality is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of the general welfare and happiness; the endeavor so to rule our lives that we may serve and bless mankind.”
“If, in the present chaotic and shameful struggle for existence, when organized society offers a premium on greed, cruelty, and deceit, men can be found who stand aloof and almost alone in their determination to work for good rather than gold.”
“The exemption of women from military service is founded not on any natural inaptitude that men do not share, but on the fact that communities cannot reproduce themselves without plenty of women. Men are more largely dispensable, and are sacrificed accordingly.”
“the worst part about making a soldier of a man is not that a soldier kills, but that the soldier loses his own soul.”
“To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over, they will fight over words, fancies, or women; or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions… To fight for a reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior despises.”
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
“Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.”
“It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.”
“A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”
“Today, writing is a grave duty. Its purpose is not to entertain the mind with fairy tales and make it forget, but to proclaim a state of mobilization to all the luminous forces still surviving in our age of transition, and to urge men to do their utmost to surpass the beast.”
“If anything is clear in the experience of mankind, it is that successful revolutionists soon behave like the men they have overthrown.”
“in those thousand times a thousand years, man had to be pugnacious, always ready to fight—for his food, for his mate, for his life. If he could, he took more mates than one, for hunting and fighting were mortally dangerous and left a surplus of women over men; so the male is still polygamous [or polygamous] by nature.”
“When a man becomes a soldier, he ceases to be a man and goes back to the beast he once was in some other life.”
“The white man's symbol is the square. Square is his house, his office buildings with walls that separate people from one another. Square is the door that keeps strangers out... gadgets, boxes—TV sets, washing machines, computers, cars... You become a prisoner inside all these boxes. More and more young white people want to stop being 'straight' and 'square' and try to become round, join our circle. That is good.”
“All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
“the social effects of fighting a war by railway... just as every citizen had been a worker, every citizen became a soldier. Previous wars had had no such scope.”
“A Warrior is the master of his fate. No matter what fate throws at him, fame or infamy, health or sickness, poverty or riches, he uses the situation for his own inner development.”
“The Japanese are a good people who love chrysanthemums. But depending on the leadership, they can be transformed with great ease into barbaric warriors.”
“Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)”
“That in China the scholar ranked at the top of the social scale may have been Confucius’ doing, but Taoism is fully as responsible for placing the soldier at that bottom.”
“The Greatest Generation? They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are mis-educating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War II prepares us—innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others—for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”
“The average man acts only if there is a chance for profit. Warriors act not for profit but for the spirit.”
“An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.”
“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.”
“Avoid teams at all cost - there is no ‘I’ in team… but there is an ‘I’ in independence, individuality and integrity.”
“Bodhisattvas are known as warriors because they are visionary. They are not confused, and they do not shy away from others.”
“the warrior’s journey is based on resting in the state of warriorship rather than struggling to take the next step.. which is not based on ego-centered concerns but on resting in unconditional confidence, free from aggression.”
“A warrior doesn’t need color television or video games… doesn’t need to read comic books… the world of entertainment doesn’t arise.”
“I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.”
“He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain.”
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