Chapter 11
“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
…
We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”
One way to think of the Daodejing is a critique of our modern way of thinking about space. Our thinking about space is dominated by impoverished notions of utility, efficiency, productivity rooted in a mashup of perverted forms of Christianity and capitalism. Francis Bacon and John Locke construed the Biblical mandate for humanity to “have dominion over” and “subdue” the earth as a license to conquer nature through science and technology and maximize yield of the land. For Locke, the great sin was waste; one’s very right to property was premised on efficiently using the land. Extractive and consumer capitalism drives us not just to use, but to use up, scarce resources as quickly as possible in order to meet the multiplication of desires it produces.
But in the natural world, waste is food and trash is treasure. Daoism embraces a very different kind of efficiency—one that is basically conservative. For the Daoist, efficacy (de) is the supreme virtue. It is “making the most of your ingredients.” And the most important ingredients—the real “value-add”—is not our own manual or mental labor, or the materials from which we fashion our wares, but the empty space that allows the making to take place.
Take speech. All the words we perceive and receiver ride on complex currents of structured air projected through space. If we were more mindful of our breath—and the “conspiracy” (literally, “breathing together”) of life in which we are complicit—how much more often and easily would we speak true?
We shape sounds into words, but it is breath that holds whatever we think.
We work with speech, but breath is what we use.
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.