Chapter 5
“The Tao doesn’t take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
She welcomes both saints and sinner.”
Is Lao-tzu preaching moral relativism?
To paraphrase David Foster Wallace writing about atheism, in the day to day trenches of adult life, there’s no such thing as moral relativism. “Moral relativism” only exists as a theory that academic philosophers haggle about, and as a bogeyman in the imaginations of cultural conservatives. In real life, no one actually does—or could—live that way.
Just as Nietzsche’s call for us to go “beyond good and evil” was not sanctioning venery or violence, Lao-tzu is nudging us to consider that the moral categories we cut the world with are mere conventions—useful some of the time, dangerous when taken as absolute. We all cut the world with different dyads: saints and sinners, winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed. But when we do this, we cut others and, unconsciously, ourselves, in two.
Indeed, the real “relativist” is the moral absolutist, the fundamentalist who is blind to how what he calls “good” generates—and is thus related to—what he calls evil. And the true absolutist, the “Master,” is the one who sees the folly of trying to be “right” and “winning” the game of morality, the one, as we saw in chapter 3, who “leads by emptying people’s minds.”
Such a message might seem opposed to Christianity, since God only creates good, not evil. But is Jesus not like “the Master,” always going toward the sinners? Like Lao-tzu, Jesus is hell bent (!) on scrambling people’s dualistic moral matrices in order to lead them toward unitive consciousness, so precisely captured in St. Paul’s “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Yet as Father Richard Rohr likes to point out, “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name. The “mystical body of Christ” is not Jesus’ resurrected body floating around in some parallel dimension, but what Daoism calls the “10,000 things,” a term of art for the cosmos. Or put another way, it is the person Jesus’ resurrected body—but that is the same body, of which we are all a part, that we call the universe. “Salvation” is not about believing in Jesus, but becoming like Jesus.
Not without reason does Jesus rebuke his disciples for misunderstanding him. Like a Zen master striking a stiff student, Jesus upbraids them for failing to grasp his parables and metaphors. Warning them to beware the “yeast of the Pharisees,” he asks with exasperation, “How could you fail to see that I was not speaking about bread?” (Matthew 16:11)
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.