Chapter 73

Chapter 73

Being over bold and confident is deadly.
The wise use of caution will keep you alive.

One is the way to death,
and the other is the way to preserve your life.
Who can understand the workings of Heaven?

The Tao of the universe
does not compete, yet wins;
does not speak, yet responds;
does not command, yet is obeyed;
and does act, but is good at directing.

The nets of Heaven are wide,
but nothing escapes its grasp.

================================================================

“Being over bold and confident is deadly.”

Ecclesiastes 9:11

“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (King James Bible)

The above verse from the Old Testament can certainly be aptly applied to the above quotation from the tao te ching. However, I would like to approach the two quotes from various points of view.

The first point to note is that because even the wise and the brave are sometimes not spared the occasional turn of events against their favor, they always have to take a cautious approach.

However, there is another aspect I would like to point out here. Before that, I would like to narrate a personal childhood story of mine.

When I was a 6th grader at primary school, I entered a local county math competition with another girl in my class. We both were representatives from our school and were supposed to wipe out competitors from different primary schools in the small county. There were maybe four or five primary schools, I don’t know. All these schools, with my alma mater included, are simply located in some countryside and very far from major urban areas. Again, I say this was a very small local county and I did not think I could not win the gold medal in this small competition because I thought my math skills were at a high school student’s level. I don’t know how I was even able to think that. In fact, my father urged me to study middle school and high school math textbooks in advance – which I think now was pure mental insanity – so I studied them and thought that I mastered them. That was obviously an illusion only possible in the mind of a young naïve child. I think I was able to sustain that illusion for a while because when I solved some very elementary workout problems in those textbooks and saw that my answers were right, I thought I mastered the math concepts. In fact, I was merely doing the calculations suggested in the exemplary answers. When I saw that my answers were right, I mistakenly believed I mastered the high school level math.

I went to the public local education center and took the math competition test. It was too difficult, and I got screwed up and completely broke down in the test center. I remember crying every day for about a week. It was a crushing loss. The girl that I entered the competition with actually did better on the test than me, and I felt very humiliated and devastated; I could not believe that a girl could be better than me in some respect (she won a silver medal, and me a bronze medal; there were several gold, silver and bronze medals.). I was not able to explain or justify how I screwed up the test, so the only way of convincing myself that the whole test affair was not fair or real was to read repeatedly the above verse of Ecclesiastes. I am, in fact, a superior math boy. But I failed the test because I was too nervous and broke under pressure. It is not that I was bad at math, but actually very good at math, but was too anxious, and I failed it. This is how I thought. I repeatedly uploaded some piece of writing explaining why I failed the test but still am a good math boy on a Yahoo board and added the verse of Ecclesiastes because that seemed to well explain that even skilled people can sometimes fail because of misfortune, but it seemed that somebody kept deleting my uploads. I also sent a letter to my class teacher explaining that the whole test thing was a scam because I was not able to fully showcase my abilities because I was too anxious. Now I think that when I was young I was too delusional and could not believe that other kids could be superior to me. But the reality was that I failed a small local county size math competition. Nonetheless, I could not bear the thinking that I lost. It was too much for me to psychologically process at young age.

You may wonder by now what I am trying to get at. Note the above verse of Ecclesiastes again. Did Solomon not say “time and chance happeneth to them all”? Because some bad luck can happen to all, I was one of them and unlucky, so failed the test. However, Solomon’s dictum can virtually justify every situation, and losers like me can blame bad luck every time they taste bad results and things do not work their way.

OK. I understand that the above autobiographical narrative of mine is actually only remotely related to what should be a discussion on the content of the chapter of the tao te ching itself. Nevertheless, this whole affair – the Ecclesiastes thing and how I used the verse to make an excuse for my failure – personally reminds me of the limitation of the tao te ching: its content is too vague. If you say that the tao is not the eternal tao that you can say or define, then, in principle, this can virtually apply everywhere. This is like Socrates saying that he doesn’t know a shit, so if people simply talk like him saying that they don’t know a shit, then it all makes them some sages.

Even though Nietzsche’s perspectivism allows various interpretations of texts or phenomenon in general, it does not mean that every theory or interpretation can be valuable. Just because poetry can be written by anyone does not mean that poems that they write are all equal in their literary merits.

“The Tao of the universe does not compete, yet wins”

One mere individual cannot match the vastness of the Heaven. Therefore, what one can only do is to open himself up to the “influence” of the Heaven.

However, this chapter reminds me of Sun Tzu’s Art of War again. A superior warrior expends only a little amount of energy and yet submits you.

Somebody that is really good in competition seems to know every one of your movements. He instinctively anticipates your next turns.

When practicing jiu-jit su as a white belt, I realized that experienced practitioners of jiu jit su did not even have to drain their energy so hard in order to submit their comparatively inexperienced sparring partners. They instead make their opponents wear themselves out cardio-wise and then handily and swiftly submit them when they are exhausted. Or when they see a small opening in their opponent, they exploit it quickly.The high level practitioners of jiu jit su consciously do not expend much energy in the first round of sparring because they want to conserve their energy and continue with the remaining sparring sessions. Therefore, when sparring with white belts, they do not even seem like they are competing that hard. They simply do it apparently easily and swiftly. They “do not compete and yet win.”