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I took another look at chapter 1 of the Daodejing and noticed anew the middle section. It has two lines that have to do with no-desire and desire. Addiss and Lombardo translate it character by character as:
Empty of desire, perceive mystery.
Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.
“Empty of desire” may miss something here. The Chinese is wu-yu “non-desire”, which may mean not the absence of desire, but “objectless” or “non-coercive” desire.
What interests me is that the text seems to value non-coercive desire, and to also value more traditional desire. Both may have a place in the Way. Non-coercive desire allows us to observe the mystery; traditional desire allows us to observe the boundaries (as Ames and Hall translate it.)
This is intriguing and may have implications for our Zen practice. What boundaries is this chapter talking about? How does having the desire (for example: for chocolate cake, or to want to enjoy the pleasure of Tai-chi) allow us to see boundaries? What part does desire play in our practice? Food for thought. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
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1 comment:
Eric:
Thank you for the post. Associating freely, I associate with desire a feeling of lacking something, for example, desiring chocolate is also lacking that sweet taste on my tongue and perhaps some warm, cuddly sense of completeness with good food. Where do we separate mental construct from physiological need? Is hunger a desire? Where is the line between appetite and hunger?
Empty of desire - having truly let go of desire, feeling no appetite or hunger or perhaps being hungry, but without concept of needing/wanting to do anything about it. Letting go of rational concept. Something shifts in our mind/brain. Another consciousness is reached. Mystery perhaps. Different for sure. Complete truth, complete reality. Whole-ness.
Filled with desire, perceive only my own projections. I am disconnected from reality or truth, for I can only see some of its manifestations, that which my conscious mind can wrap itself around, my rational projectionary mind that is preconditioned on my own prior experiences, sees all through those prior experiences; very subjective; very I-oriented. Filled with desire I cannot experience the entirety of the truth at once. Manifestations = personal projections; mystery = complete truth, all-encompassing?
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