The Importance of Living - Who Can Best Enjoy

Find Thyself.

Confucius said, “If a person does not say to himself, “What to do? What to do? Indeed I do not know what to do with such a person”.

Philosophy of the Half-and-Half.  The conflict between action and inaction ends in a compromise or contentment with a very imperfect heaven on earth.  This gives rise to wise and merry philosophy of living, eventually typified in the life of Tao, china’s greatest poet and personality.

Loss follows the pursuit and gains.

When go into the world follow its customs.

A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child

Passion, Wisdom & Courage

The ideal character best able to enjoy life is a warm, carefree and unafraid soul. Three mature virtues of the great man are, “Wisdom, compassion, and courage”.

A passionate nature always loves women, but who loves women is not necessarily a passionate nature.  Passion holds up the bottom of the world, while genius paints its proof.  For unless we have passion, we have nothing to start out in life with at all.  It is passion that is soul of life, the lights in the stars, the lift in music and song, the joy in flowers, the plumage in birds, the charm in woman, and the life in scholarship.  It is as impossible to speak of a soul without passion as to speak of music without expression.

Man struggles with fate, gives up the battle, and the tragedy comes in the aftermath, in a flood of reminiscences, of vain regret and longing.

The passion between husband and wife as the very foundation of all normal human life.

No child is born with a cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.  In the process of learning “World experience” there is many a violence done to our original nature.

While a man with passion and sentiment may do many foolish and precipitate things, a man without passion or sentiment is a joke and a caricature.

As I look back upon my fifty years, it still makes me happy to think of when I sinned, but when I think I was stupid, I cannot forgive myself even now.

Life is harsh and man with a warm, generous and sentimental nature may be easily taken in by his cleverer fellow man.  Generous people often make mistakes by their generosity by their too generous regard of their enemies and faith in their friends.

To me wisdom and courage are same thing, for courage is born of an understanding of life.  He who completely understands life is always brave.  Wisdom that does not gives us courage is not worth having at all.

There is a wealth of humbug in this life.  Two big humbugs : fame and wealth.  Many cultured persons were able to escape the lure of wealth, but only the very greatest could escape the lure of fame.  It is easier to get rid of the desire for money then to get rid of the desire of fame.

Another great humbug, Power & Success.  Desires for success, fame and wealth are euphemistic names for the fear of failure, poverty and obscurity.  These fears dominate our lives.

A public office often demands that a man attend six dinners a week in the name of consecrate his life to the service of mankind.  Why does he not consecrate himself to a simple supper at home.  Under the spell of that humbug of fame or power, a man is soon prey to other incidental humbugs. He soon begins to want to reform society, to uplift other morality, to defend the religion, to crush vice, to map programmes for others to carryout, bloc programmes that other people have mapped out; to read before a convention a statistical report of what other people have done for him under his administration, to sit on committees explaining blue-prints of an exposition, in general, to interfere in other peoples lives.  How completely the great problems of labour, unemployment and tariff leaves the mind of a defeated politician.

These humbugs keeps him happily busy if he is successful, and give him the illusion that he is really doing something and is therefore “Somebody”.

There is a social humbug, the humbug of fashion.  The courage to be one’s won natural self is quite a rare thing.

The two great fears, the fear of God and the fear of death.  Equally universal fear is the fear of one’s neighbors.

There are few who could wear their reputation and a high position with a smile and remain their natural selves, they are the ones who know they are acting when they are acting, who do not share the artificial illusions of rank, title, property and wealth and who accept these things with a tolerant smile.  When they come, their way, but refuse to believe that they themselves are thereby different from ordinary human beings.

It is this class of men, the truly great in spirit, who remains essentially simple in their personal lives.

Nothing show more conclusively a small mind than a little government bureaucrat suffering from illusions of his own grandeur, or a social upstart displaying her jewels, or a half-backed writer imagining himself to belong to the company of the immortals and immediately becoming a less simple and less natural human being.

We often forget that we have real life to live off stage.  And so we sweat and labour and go through life, living not for ourselves in accordance with our true instincts, but for approval of society, like “old spinsters working with their needles to make wedding dresses for other women”.

Cynicism, Folly & Camouflage

The highest idea of peace, tolerance, simplicity and contentment.  Such teachings include the wisdom of the foolish, the advantage of camouflage, the strength of weakness and the simplicity of the truly sophisticated.  At the bottom of Laoste philosophy is pacifism is the willingness to put up with temporary losses and bide one’s time, the belief that in the scheme of things, with nature operating by the law of action and reaction, no one has a permanent advantage over the others and no one is a “damn fool” all the time.

The greatest wisdom seems like stupidity.

The greatest eloquence like stuttering.

Movement overcomes cold

But staying overcomes heat

So he by his limpid calm

Puts everything right under heaven.

The natural conclusion is that there is no use for contention.  “Show me a man of violence that come to a good end, and I will take him for my teacher”. “Show me a dictator that can dispense with the services of a secret police, and I will be his follower”..

Laoste says, “When the Tao prevails not, horses are trained for battle, when the Tao prevails, horses are trained to pull dung-carts”.

The best charioteers do not rush ahead,

The best fighters do not make displays of wrath.

The greatest conqueror wins without joining issues,

The best user of men acts as though he was their inferior,

This is called the power that comes of not contending, is called the capacity of use men.

The secret being mated to heaven, to what was of old.

What is in the end to be shrink,

must first be stretched.

Whatever is to be weakened,

must being by being made strong.

What is to be overthrown,

must begin as a giver.

This is called ”dimming” one’s light.

It is thus that the soft overcomes the hard

And the weak, the strong.

“It is best to leave the fish down in the pool,

Best to leave the state’s sharpest weapons where none can see them”.

Water remains forever the symbol of the strength of the weak.  Water that greatly drips and makes a hole in a rock, and water which has the great wisdom of seeking the lowest level.

Oriental civilization represents the female principle while the occidental civilization represents the male principle.

“Never be the first in the world”.  There is a certain bird called i-erh. They fly simultaneously, they roost in the body. In advancing, none strives to be the first, in retreating; none ventures to be the last.  In eating none will be the first to begin.  It is considered proper to take the leftover of others.  Therefore, they are always at peace and outside world is unable to harm them.  They escape trouble.

Straight trees are the first felled. Sweet wells are soonest exhausted, you make a show of your knowledge in order to startle fools.  You cultivate yourselves in contract to the degradation of others.

There is the wisdom of the foolish,

The gracefulness of the slow

The subtly of stupidity,

The advantage of lying low.

Blessed are idiots, for they are the happiest people on earth.  The greatest wisdom is stupidity.  The greatest eloquence like stuttering. “Spit forth intelligence”. It is difficult to muddle headed.  It is difficult to be clever, but it is still more difficult to graduate from cleverness to muddle headedness. Don’t be too smart.  The wisest men is often one who pretends to be “damn fool”.

The gospel of ignorance and the theory of camouflage are the best weapons in the battle of life.  The popularity of fools is an undeniable fact.  The world hates the man who is too smart in his dealings with his fellow-men.

Extremely stupid and extremely loyal are the best servants.  Those we like are not those we respect for distinguished ability and those we respect for distinguished ability are not those we like, and that we like a stupid servant because he is more reliable and because in his company, we can better relax and do not have to set up a condition of defense against his presence.

Most wise men choose to marry a not too smart wife, and most wise girls choose a not too smart husband as a life companion.

Philosophy if Half-and-Half, “Middle Path”.

Those are best cynics who are half cynics. The highest type of life after all is the life of sweet reasonableness.  A well ordered life lying somewhere between the two extremes – the doctrines of the Half and Half.  It is that spirit of sweet reasonableness arriving at a perfect balance between action and inaction, shown in the ideal of a man living in half fame and semi-obscurity, half lazily active and half actively lazy, not so poor that he cannot pay his rent and no so rich that he doesn’t have to work a little or couldn’t wish to have slightly more to help his friends, who plays the piano, but only well enough for his most intimate friends to hear, and chiefly to please himself, who collects but just enough to load his mantle piece, who reads but not too hard, learns a lot but does not become a specialist. In short, it is ideal of middle class life.

Man is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven. The happiest man is he man of the middle class who has earned slight means of economic independence who has done a little, but just a little.  Slightly distinguished but not too distinguished.  Life is fairly carefree and yet not altogether carefree.

A Lover’s Life.

A curious combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of spirituality without asceticism and materialism with sensuality, in which the senses and the spirit have come to live together in harmony.  One who understands the charm of women without being coarse, who loves life heartily but loves it with restaurant, and who sees the unreality of the successes and failures of the active world, and stands somewhat aloof and detached, without being hostile to it.

Tao, in order to keep himself from being idle moved a pile of bricks from one place to another in the morning, and moved them back in the afternoon.  Humble, simple and independent, he was extremely chary of company.