Indian stream·Tao Te Ching·Chapter 41 — Hearing the Way
Hearing of the Tao, the highest student practises it
When the highest student hears of the Tao he practises it; the average is half-hearted; the lowest laughs aloud — and if he did not laugh, it would not be the Tao. Hidden, nameless — yet only the Tao alone nourishes and completes.
Source context
- Theme
- paradox of receptivity: the highest good appears empty, foolish, or hidden to the uninitiated
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Enneads)The One in Plotinus is characterized by a radical hiddenness and self-sufficiency that parallels Tao's concealment from the merely clever mind in Chapter 41.
- Vedanta (Kena Upanishad)The Kena Upanishad's insistence that Brahman is not known by those who claim to know it, but is known by those who acknowledge not-knowing, exhibits cross-tradition congruence with the Tao's inaccessibility to the assured mind.
- Kabbalah (Ein Sof / Tzimtzum)The kabbalistic doctrine that Ein Sof withdraws and appears as absence or void to created perception offers structural congruence with the Tao's self-concealment as apparent emptiness.
Chapter 41
Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it. Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit to be the Tao.
Therefore the sentence-makers have thus expressed themselves:--
'The Tao, when brightest seen, seems light to lack; Who progress in it makes, seems drawing back; Its even way is like a rugged track. Its highest virtue from the vale doth rise; Its greatest beauty seems to offend the eyes; And he has most whose lot the least supplies. Its firmest virtue seems but poor and low; Its solid truth seems change to undergo; Its largest square doth yet no corner show A vessel great, it is the slowest made; Loud is its sound, but never word it said; A semblance great, the shadow of a shade.'
The Tao is hidden, and has no name; but it is the Tao which is skilful at imparting (to all things what they need) and making them complete.