I Love My Teachers

I love all my teachers, not just Jesus. Lao Tzu is another teacher of mine, and Rumi, who showed me that I was not alone in my erotic relationship with the Beloved. Vine Deloria is a more contemporary teacher, a Native American lawyer, activist and theologian who died just a few years ago. And my dad, of course! And my kids! And Jack! Hey, teachers are everywhere, aren't they?

Lao Tzu holds a special place in my heart because I found him early on. Dad was collecting books about religions like crazy that year, and he thought I might be interested in the Tao Te Ching. It swept me up in a tidal wave of 16-year old intellectual pleasure. Do you remember? Those first stirrings of understanding, then the growing lust to learn more, to understand deeply . . . perhaps to figure it all out? And then, I thought, I would write a book . . . remember Ruthie? I would write the definitive philosophical work of the later half of the 20th century! My wisdom would open hearts and minds around the world and I would save humanity from itself! Nothing less would do . . .

Now, of course, I know how puny I am, and I'm content with my little corner of the internet. Those who know do not speak. What a burden lifted from my heart: I don't have to save the world.

The world doesn't need saving anyway, that's what Lao Tzu would say. I bought the Gai-Fu Feng and Jane English version of the Tao for myself that year -- I still think it's the best translation -- and shared it with my friend Neil, and it influenced both of us. Years later, he inscribed a few lines in a book to me: blunt the sharpness, untangle the knot, soften the glare, let your wheels run along old ruts. I am still seeking the peace and wisdom I need to follow that way.

The verse that's most important to me is the first. I'll reproduce it here in full. I think it sums up what underlies all the rest of my system of belief: that we are too puny to really know the truth. We can only tell our stories, and listen for stories that resonate. We seek the Mystery, the truth that cannot be told, and we will never find it in this life, but our souls take pleasure in the search . . .

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source, but differ in name; this appears as darkess.
Darkness within darkness,
The gate to all Mystery.

An excellent website for the Tao is D. C. Lau's Translation. Here you'll not only find a good translation of the whole text and some interesting ruminations on them, but the original Chinese characters and their word-for-word translation, allowing the reader to piece the meanings together directly from the characters.

Here is a story. Many years before Jesus, a boy was born in China to an old woman. It's said that she gestated for 100 years, and the baby was born with the wisdom of old age, hence his name "Old Boy" or Lao Tzu. Content to live quietly and wanting to study, he became a librarian, and he watched as the same wars and political struggles, the same greed for money and lust for power that is destroying us today, hurt the people he loved. Deciding that he had had enough of humans, he chose to leave the empire, hoping to live out his years in peace. He mounted a water buffalo, and road it to the very gates of the civilized world, but at the gates he was halted by the emperor's guard.

"If you want to leave," said the guard, "you will have to leave everything you own behind you."

"All I have is what I know," replied Lao Tzu.

"So, you will leave that!" the guard declared. And what the guard wrote down that day comes down to us as the book of the Tao Te Ching.
Best to you,
Puny