Tao Te Ching, Passage 5

I have chosen the translation from The Illustrated Tao Te Ching by Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer and Jay Ramsay.

Heaven and earth are not like humans.
The Tao does not act like a human.
They don't expect to be thanked
for making life
so they view it without expectation.

Heaven and earth are like a pair of bellows.
they are empty, and yet they can never be exhausted.
Work them, and they produce more and more.
there's too much talking, it's really better to stay quiet.
There are too many laws, when all you have to do is to hold on to the centre.

My interpretation of Passage 5

Most people, when they do something good, expect to be thanked for it in some form; verbally, with a thank-you card, with points in heaven, or whatever. The Tao gave rise to the "ten thousand things" without expecting to be thanked for it, or worshipped for it, or sacrificed to, or anything else similar. The Tao gave rise to everything in an as unselfish manner as possibly could be.

The second part of the passage refers to the use of the Tao. You can never use up the Tao. It is the truly inexhaustible source of everything, basically the purest form of love possible for it is this love, this energy that created everything that is without expecting to get anything in return.

That infinite unselfish love can never be used up; not by the entire human race or by all the races of intelligent beings in the universe; it is greater than all of them put together.

As to the third part:" there's too much talking, it's really better to stay quiet", this is similar to the "he who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak (passage 56). This is another example of where the actual ordering of the sections is questionable. I noted elsewhere that the Tao Te Ching was written in sections that were connected physically to each other; it the physical connections broke, then the sections could get mixed up. I think that might be why there seem to be four sections to this passage; the first two seem to be related to each other, but the last two don't seem to be related to the first two or to each other, either.

Anyhow, it's easy to get lost in the words when describing something that cannot actually be described. Whatever the Tao is, it is something that is totally beyond our capability to define or place into some kind of nice scientific pigeon-hole. Thus, there come times when it's best to simply stop trying to explain something and just accept it for what it is.

The last portion in this particular version uses the word "laws", yet most other versions translation the last line something similar to "it's better to stay centered," or "hold on to the mean." If it's thought of that way then the last two sections do seem to be related.

They seem to be saying something along the lines of this: don't talk the subject to death; don't try to make some kind of clinical explanation of the Tao; it would be easy to get lost in your own words. Rather, accept the Tao for what it is, even if you can't define that precisely. Stay centered in the Tao rather than get too involved in trying to explain it.


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