Indian stream·Tao Te Ching·Chapter 13 — Favor and Disgrace
Honor great trouble as you honor the body
Favor and disgrace alike disturb. Great trouble comes from having a body. He who values the world as himself can be entrusted with the world.
Source context
- Theme
- disgrace and favor as twin afflictions binding the self to external esteem
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Vedanta (neti neti / ahamkara doctrine)The Vedantic analysis of ahamkara (ego-making faculty) identifies attachment to social valuation as a primary mechanism binding the jiva to conditioned existence — a cross-tradition congruence with Laozi's equation of favor and disgrace as twin disturbances of the true self.
- Stoic apatheiaStoic ethics similarly treats both favorable and unfavorable external opinion as indifferents (adiaphora), locating disturbance not in the event but in the self's identification with it — structurally congruent with chapter 13's insistence that trouble arises from having a bodily self at all.
Chapter 13
Favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared; honour and great calamity, to be regarded as personal conditions (of the same kind).
What is meant by speaking thus of favour and disgrace? Disgrace is being in a low position (after the enjoyment of favour). The getting that (favour) leads to the apprehension (of losing it), and the losing it leads to the fear of (still greater calamity):--this is what is meant by saying that favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared.
And what is meant by saying that honour and great calamity are to be (similarly) regarded as personal conditions? What makes me liable to great calamity is my having the body (which I call myself); if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?
Therefore he who would administer the kingdom, honouring it as he honours his own person, may be employed to govern it, and he who would administer it with the love which he bears to his own person may be entrusted with it.