"In Tao the only motion is returning...": So I woke up today a little anxious (ironic, as you will see in a moment). A warm pressure front has pushed into my region bringing a promise of 50+ degrees in February the day before (and to be followed tomorrow by) more freezing weather. This winter has been most disappointing... According to the NOAA seasonal snow accumulation map, we are in the 12-24 inch band. Last year at this point we were pushing 100 inches (albeit it was a record-ly excellent snow year). This latest warm front also brings with it a crushing headache on a day that I need to grade a pile of essays and wish to turn a wrench on a 40 year old motorcycle engine at the Kevin O. School of Motorcycle Maintenance... [My son says that I should say "do mechanical stuff" instead of "turn a wrench," but I do so love that turn of phrase.]
"...": I lay in bed late into the morning hoping for sleep to drag me into a little functional oblivion... but alas, it was not to be so; just dream snippets of a most fragmented nature. And so, I awoke, dowsed my night in two cups of dark roasted pleasure, and downed a bowl-or-so of honey-nut sweetness. I'll add an ibuprofen chaser soon if I my brain feels no relief from the pressure... And I was anxious that I needed to find a topic for this week's blog entry. Some Sundays there is an obvious topic that has been brewing for weeks; other Sundays I react to "the moment" I am in as I boot up the computer. Today all there was in the frontal lobe of my brain was a pounding pressure and no clear thoughts...
"...The only useful quality, weakness...": So I took a stab at a simple google search on a trusted topic of my interest in Buddhism. I typed "Buddhist Wisdom, images." I was hoping for a piece of text or an image to inspire ongoing thoughts I am having about how to behave or react in relation to the world around me. Perhaps I would see something to convey "peaceful acceptance," or "insight gained." I might even follow up after hunting down some words from Thich Nhat Hanh's poetry—not lyrically all that good, but packed with well intentioned kernels of revelational truth. His peace is like a resonating bell in my soul...
"...": I scanned the images and memes that flooded my screen, disappointed in what I was seeing. Much of it was all too cutesy; lots of smoothed imagery of stones, Siddhartha's head, or the Dalai Lama and sparse text. In the midst of this was a cartoonish depiction of Lao Tzu and a quote that read like wisdom from the modern age of self help rather than that from a philosophical Chinese sage. Although Lao Tzu's philosophy influences Buddhism as it moves through China on its way to Japan, Lao, himself, is considered the father of a different tradition. I was looking for Buddhism, not Taoism. But google is less concerned with accuracy than with an algorithm based on popularity (clicks), and anticipating my intentions. The quote on the image did not bother me so much. It was about anxiety, and I was feeling anxious. The focus on the moment was a refreshing thought for finding my Buddha-self, but the language and context was not right. [Not to mention that so much of my peace comes from positive memories, and so much of my hope comes from looking optimistically to the future. Sometimes living in the present can be quite un-peaceful.] This language attributed to Lao Tzu reminded me of something heard in an Alcoholics Anonymous room, "If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow you are ready to [poop] all over today." I love Lao Tzu. I have read his Tao—four score nuggets of poetic philosophy that forms the foundation of the entire tradition—several times. I could not for the life of me remember ANY passage even remotely similar to this translation...
"...For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being...": So I continued my google searching looking for the true author of the quote and found my way to several blogs on the same realization I had. One that I particularly enjoyed reading is called
Scripturient: Intellectual Brownian Motion, by Ian Chadwick. He writes:
Poor Lao Tzu. He gets saddled with the most atrocious of the New Age codswallop. As if it wasn’t enough to be for founder of one of the most obscure philosophies (not a religion, since it has no deity), he gets to be the poster boy for all sorts of twaddle from people who clearly have never read his actual writing.
This time it’s a mushy feel-good quote on Facebook (mercifully without kittens or angels) that reads,
"If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present."
"...": What follows is a fun, half intellectual/half rant about the very quote I was researching. I was hooked with the words "codswallop" and "twaddle." I disagree with Chadwick's outright dismissal that this quote is "nonsense,"—he argues the quote as junk philosophy and is insultingly critical of those who would find value in it—but his underlying critique that people post without verifying their sources echoes a frequent complaint I have in the internet age. He writes:
Wisdom isn’t a series of quotable sound bites. Or a poster with kittens.
Stop sharing stuff if you haven’t verified the source.
"...Being itself is the product of Not-being.": It's easier to say "Stop sharing stuff if you haven’t verified the source" than to do it. How do we know when what we read is not accurate? How can we find time to verify every last thing we hear/read? So often we find the "right" thing to say, offered by others, and pass it along. I think we need to develop a "Spiedy-sense" that something is wrongly quoted or attributed, or that a statistic seems out of whack, or that a story seems implausible. The best defense for this is to be a healthy skeptic, and to read and dig a lot. The power so share easily on the internet may create part of this problem, but the solution is also in the relatively easy action of searching the internet for verification as well. Sadly this very simple solution is easily atrophied in an age when a quick question into the butt of one's iPhone yields just as quick answers to so many of our questions...
"...": So here is some of the wisdom I was originally looking for, taken from the work of Thich Nhat Hanh. When a bell sounds...
Listen, listen,
This wonderful sound
brings me back to my true self.
