The Way and the Power of Virtue

  The masses are all resplendent and rejoicing, as if feasting on the fatted calf, as if climbing a pagoda in spring to enjoy the scenery. I alone am anchored in the water, without showing any signs of divine favor, Innocent as a newborn babe, who has yet to sneer or cheer; Tired from hard work, but with seemingly no home to return to. The masses all have their surplus things, I alone am not leaving behind a legacy of loss and loose ends. How foolish is my heart – like a monkey holding a snake! The common folk are brilliant, I alone am unenlightened. The common folk are insightful, I alone am close-minded. Rolling waves, they are as the sea; blown about on the wind, seemingly without footing. The masses all have their means and undertakings, I alone am unyielding and lowly. I alone am different from people, and value feeding from the Mother.   In a rare shift to first-person narrative, this passage describes the feelings and sentiments that we feel as...

Sever academia and there will be no feelings of inadequacy! How far apart are assenting and dissenting? How wide is the gap between beauty and ugliness? We have to be afraid of what other people fear?  What a waste!   That is so imbalanced! Sever the cords that bind us to academia – an institutionalized system of indoctrination rather than true pursuit of knowledge and learning!   In ancient China as in modern America, there have always been biased and self-serving institutions promoting indoctrination and conformity to their own agenda. As scholar Noam Chomsky puts it: “Education is a system of imposed ignorance” that indoctrinates the masses to conform to a set of socio-political and/or religious beliefs.   Returning to Chomsky: “The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.”   Cut off the prestige of biased academic intellectualism or the “ivory tower syndrome” so often disconnected from real life where certain int...

  Cut off prevailing wisdom, discard discrimination,  and the people will benefit a hundredfold. Cut off craftiness, discard profiteering,  and thieves and bandits will cease to exist. Cut off hypocrisy, discard deception,  and the people will return to filial piety and parental care. These three sayings are insufficient in their message,  perhaps to these should be added: Look to the simplicity of undyed cloth,  embrace the potential of an uncarved block, reduce selfishness, and cut out insatiable appetites. When we institutionalize and popularize wisdom and outsmarting knowledge – what has worked for some people (usually celebrities) in certain circumstances in the past – we run the risk of quashing individual intuition and innovation.   One example: How many people have bounced from fad diet to fad diet or one workout routine to the next feeling without getting the results they want?   How many then give up feeling like a failure ...

  Only when the Great Way is abandoned,  is there humaneness and rightness; Only when the wise and insightful emerge,  are there great hypocrites and posers; Only when the Six Kinships are inharmonious,  is there filial piety and parental care; Only when the country is embroiled in turmoil, are there loyal ministers. This chapter opens with a criticism of social constructs and relative relationships.   In ancient China, the social virtues of humaneness or benevolence, literally defined as the “interaction between two people,” and rightness, defined by doing the right thing at the right time, were cardinal Confucian virtues that were dictated by subjective social standards and relative relationships that changed depending on who was involved and what one’s relationship was to the other.   This sort of variable virtue or moral relativism only happens when the Great Way has been abandoned and discarded.   The Way is impartial and the highest goo...