Get your own Free Home Page
A hundred years ago America began to discover the Orient and its philosophical tradition. The discovery was valid, it reached toward the inner truth of Oriental thought. The intuitions of Emerson and Thoreau were rich in promises that were not afterwards fulfilled by successors. America did not have the patience to continue what was so happily begun. The door that had opened for an instant, closed again for a century. Now that door seems to be opening again (and sometimes one wonders if it is the door to the same house), we have another chance. It is imperative for us to find out what is inside this fabulous edifice. . .
If we want to understand the position of writers like these ancient Chinese philosophers, we must compare them not only with Plato and Parminides, but also with the Hebrew scribes, the transmittors of the wisdom tradition of the so-called sapiental books of the Old Testament. The ideogram which represents Tzu, in Lao Tzu (Master Lao) [the quasi-legendary author of the Tao Te Ching], means both “master” and “child.” A master is therefore a child of the ancient fathers, who bears their tradition with him and transmits it to future generations. Or rather, to be more accurate, a master is child who, like Lao Tzu, knows how to draw nourishment in slience from his “mother,” the Tao.
Hence, we see that a master is not merely one who learns and repeats authoratative forms of words passed on from the time of the ancients; he is one who has been born to his wisdom by the mysterious all-embracing and merciful love which is the mother of all being. He is one who knows the unknown not by intellectual penetration, or by a science that wrests for itself the secrets of the heavens, but by the wisdom of “littleness” and silence which knows how to receive in secret a word which cannot be uttered except in an enigma.
The sage, then, accomplishes very much indeed because it is the Tao that acts in him and through him. He does not act of and by himself, still less for himself alone. His action is not a violent manipulation of exterior reality, and “attack” on the outside world, bending it to his conquering will: on the contrary, he respects external reality by yielding to it, and his yielding is at once an act of worship, a recognition of sacredness, and a perfect accomplishment of what is demanded by the precise situation. The world is a sacred vessel which must not be tampered with or grabbed after. To tamper with it is to spoil it, and to grasp it is to lose it.
Christopher Dawson has remarked on the “religious vacuum” in our education. It is absolutely essential to introduce into our study of the humanities a dimension of wisdom oriented to contemplation as well as to action. For this, it is no longer sufficient merely to go back over the Christian and European cultural traditions. The horizons of the world are no longer confined to Europe and America. We have to gain new perspectives, and on this our spiritual and even our physical survival may depend.
Get your own Free Home Page