The author of the Tao wants us to keep our options open, to be open to the world around us, and to respond to it without preconceptions. That just doesn’t work.Įven thinking of life as a journey may lock us into certain ways of thinking. At times, the Tao as used by the author sounds something like “the Force” in the Star Wars universe – it is everywhere, its power is illimitable, and everyone can access it, but not by forcing the issue. The opening lines of the Tao tell us that the “Tao that can be named is not the real Tao.” In other words, as soon as you’re sure you’re on the path, you’re off the path (or maybe on the wrong path). So (with due respect to Frost) no left fork, no right fork, no difference. The author of the Tao, though, wants to get us past thinking in the binary way language directs us. Joseph Campbell in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces described the hero’s story in terms of a journey as “Departure – Adventure – Return.” In our own time, the most popular poem by Robert Frost is likely “The Road Less Traveled,” which imagines life as a journey with a fork in the road, and the route one takes makes “all the difference.” Their heroic stories are imagined as journeys over physical space (and in Aeneas’ case, through time) as well as through inward spaces. The heroes of myth are often on a journey – think Gilgamesh, or Heracles, or Odysseus, or Aeneas.
The idea is not a new one -– it wasn’t even new when the work was written in the 6th-5th century BCE - that life is a journey. In writing this year about travel and books that involve travel, there is no way I could ignore the religious text that uses the idea of the “way” or “path” (what Tao means) as a fundamental metaphor for life. They have to be blabbermouths. But their words are (in the traditional Buddhist metaphor) fingers pointing at the moon if you watch the finger, you can't see the moon.” Mitchell then goes on to say, “That's the problem with spiritual teachers. In the notes to his translation of the Tao te Ching, Stephen Mitchell relates these words from Po Chu-i. How could he have been such a blabbermouth? This month, classic lit connoisseur Bernard Norcott-Mahany continues his year-long travel theme with a review of the Tao Te Ching, which he unofficially subtitles “It don’t mean a thing without Tao Te Ching.”
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