天地不仁, 以萬物為芻狗.
聖人不仁, 以百姓為芻狗.
天地之間, 其猶橐籥乎.
虛而不屈.
動而愈出.
多言數窮.
不如守中
Heaven and Earth have no 仁;
They regard all things as straw-dogs.
The sage has no 仁;
He regards the people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth, it is like a bellows or a flute!
Empty, but not exhausted;
With movement, more comes out.
Too much talk always exhausts;
It is better to keep to the inside.“
Selah.
The lesson this morning is taken from the familiar fifth chapter from the Daodejing, the Yi Wu translation, and my key is this paper by Gang Xu.
仁 is the central virtue for Confucians, as it is for the mandarins of our own celestial kingdom.
The usual translation for 仁 is “humanity”, “benevolence” or even “Good”.
The concept is sometimes translated “empathy” and here we see a link to the central professional virtue of our own time and place.
This central virtue is more and more being called “kindness”, and from this view, the text from laoze appears paradoxical or abhorrent.
Gang Xu illustrates what he considers a primordial understanding of 仁 as being akin to bushido – a moral practice of self-sacrifice for the moral order where noblemen kill themselves out of honour and offers several examples:
The first is from Confucius himself, where he criticises a king lacking in 仁: the king had attempted to conquer the world, failed, and retreated to his bunker in shame. The king failed to 克 himself, leading to disaster. The conventional translation of 克 is “subdue” or “conquer” and so Confucius’ judgment is that the fault of the king was his failure. Gang Xu believes the root meaning of 克 is “kill” and so Confucius is, at least on one level, saying that the fault of the king was that he did not kill himself and take the noble death.
He multiplies examples, and posits this understanding of moral suicide as being the basic and ancient concept of 仁, on which he builds his bureaucratic moral framework. This is similar to how a 君子 is transformed from a “verray parfit gentil knyght” to a consummate civil servant.
With this key, an interpretation of the fifth chapter of the Daodejing is opened. Laucius is criticising not only the orthodox Confucian view of 天地人, but drawing on this primordial meaning.
He says that 天地 do indeed treat the world as a sacrifice, but not like a puffed-up, narcissistic nobleman performing a “deep” act of 仁. Instead the sacrifice is like that of straw dogs – lightly generated for the occasion, and a clear show of shallow appearances.
The proto-Confucian warrior is performing his “deep” act fundamentally for his own shallow ego, and there is a mismatch in depth.
The Daoist sage, contrarily, reflects that what lies “between 天 and 地”, produced by them, is really even more shallow than a straw dog – it is a puff of air, a noise, a whirling of wind.
Cosmologically, what lies “between 天 and 地” is 人. Laucius goes beyond calling the people “straw dogs” and calls them an inexhaustible wind. He also practices what he preaches metatextually, and takes care not to call the people 仁 by not even calling them the homophonous 人.
The Confucian attitude towards 人 of 言ing them through philosophical discourse, bureaucracy and government edicts is causing an exhaustion of the inexhaustible – a great human sacrifice, and so all 人 is being destroyed by the Confucian universalisation of the destructive principle of 仁.
The application of this to our own times, and the urging of “kindness” by the mandarins of our own celestial kingdom on those called to serve, I leave to your own contemplation.