Virtue is in what you give, not in what you get. Therefore when an army is strong it perishes, when a tree is strong it breaks, when leather is strong it rips the teeth are harder than the tongue, but they are the first to die. Those who overcome the greater by flexibility have power that cannot be measured. Those who overcome the lesser by strength come to a standoff when they meet their equals.

The essential nature of humanity likes peace, but habitual desires damage it. Those who are inwardly attentive to the self attain this and are immune to perverse energies.

The way of developed people is to cultivate the body by calmness and nurture life by frugality… To govern the body and nurture essence, sleep and rest moderately, eat and drink appropriately harmonize emotions, simplify activities.

That doesn't really change the call to us as we work in the world-it's still a matter of acting in ways that nurture the harmony and balance that feels a million light years away.įirst book I've added to the 'favorites' shelf in quite a while. That situation wouldn't have been unfamiliar to the writers who put the book together they clearly felt that the world they were living in had lost contact with the Way. Our media, politics, insitutions, everything militates against the clarity and dispassion-not to be confused with non-involvement-Wen-Tzu counsels. As a teacher, I found myself frequently reflecting on the connection between a section and classroom practice.Īs I reached the end of Wen-Tzu, which I read while on retreat at a hermitage in the Rocky Mountains (Nada, near Crestone, Colorado-if you're in need of withdrawal and rejuvenation and don't mind silence, you can't do better), I found myself thinking of how difficult it would be to realize any of the Taoist vision in the culture we've created for ourselves. Nothing that differs from the Tao Te Ching, but the connections between levels are elaborated at greater length. The central message is clear and familiar to anyone who's spent any time with Taoism: circumstances change in ways the render rigid rules destructive correct behavior is likely to become part of the problem unless it flows from deep roots in an acceptance of the Way. More even than the Tao Te Ching or Chuang-tzu, Wen-Tzu reflects the breadth of Taoist thinking, from the intensely introspective (though never solipsistic) to the worlds of politics, the economy and war. Most of the 180-odd sections in Wen-Tzu are attributed to Lao-Tzu, but the name was used to represent the wisdom flowing from a particular source, so it's really an anthology (which accounts for a certain amount of repetition). For anyone interested in Taoism, this is the place to go after the Tao Te Ching (preferably in Stephen Mitchell's translation, although the one by Thomas Cleary, who translated this book, is also solid).

Wen tzu