Tao Te Ching Ch 18

 The Door of all Wonders: 

The Commentary on the Tao Te Ching

by Nirguna Chor Kok Lam

Chapter 18

When the Great Truth (Tao) falls into disuse,

there are benevolence and rectitude.

When cleverness emerges,

there is great hypocrisy.

When the six relations* are discordant,

there are filial piety and kind affection.

When the country is in chaos,

there are loyal ministers.

*Six relations: father, son, elder brother, younger brother, husband, wife.

Review

    In this Chapter, Lao Tzu tells us that the merits of benevolence, rectitude, cleverness, filial piety and kind affection come forth after the decline of the Great Truth (Tao) among us. People who do not have the Truth abiding in them need badly to be told to have benevolence and rectitude to other people. They need to be taught to be clever dealing with different people and matters. They need to be taught to have filial piety to their parents and kind affection to their family, relatives, friends and neighbours. Otherwise, our society will be in chaos, all people will suffer badly.

   The  Truth nourishes every creature, bestowing beneficence to everything. If the Truth is prevailing among us, we are all living in harmony without any need for stipulating strict and detailed rules and instructions. We are naturally kind to each other, naturally honest to each other. We do not need to harm other or to defend for ourselves not to be harmed. There is no way for cunningness or cleverness. People are all simple and good. They are not crocked in their personality. The Truth is harmlessness, i.e. Ahimsa in Sanskrit. This is the highest virtue in the religion of the ancient sages living in the forests of the country nowadays we call it “India”. They have been the minority sadly the fact from the ancient times up to now.

    Ahimsa means no harm to anyone in speech, thought and act. Furthermore, this idea of harmlessness means to spread love to the whole universe continuously.  Only through harmlessness, i.e., Ahimsa, our world, our universe can be maintained well without chaos. Ahimsa is one of the attributes of the Truth in the Tao Te Ching. Being blind to the Truth, people lose their pure nature which is nothing but only the Truth. People do not know the Truth. They are impure with bad qualities of egoistic tendency. They can only see themselves as a great egoistic being turning blind to any light of the Truth. This sense of self-love is greater than the love of the Truth. Then people begin harming each other to attack other for their benefits or emotional enjoyment. Sins or evils come out in this way.

    Our whole world is full of harming nature, as we can see plants, insects, animals and humans trying to harm others by their own means developed through long history of evolution. Only in this sense we need goodness to fight against evil. Our world is full of good and evil mixed together because the Truth is only partly functioning in this imperfect world. It is why we need the Tao Te Ching to tell us the Truth, as people need to be taught to have virtues to be good to others. This is our situation, exactly what Lao Tzu says in this Chapter:

“When the Great Truth (Tao) falls into disuse,

there are benevolence and rectitude.”

    Mostly the Truth falls into disuse. People, either do not know the Truth as being ignorant, or intentionally do not like to accept the Truth in their life even being told. Then we need the qualities of compassion and righteousness as a strict rule for all people to observe. Otherwise, they will be punished by some notified means. The warning comes forth because people cannot act with their purity, i.e. the Truth inherent in them purely from the very beginning even before birth. However, all these remedies of teaching are only up to the superficial level, which cannot penetrate into our heart in the deeper sense. People can pretend to be virtuous in order to cheat others more severely. They can steal and rob others at the same time they are honored and highly praised as a successful meritorious people. In darkness, they were dealing with crimes and evil while people cannot know. It is because they are very clever to hide their evil and show off their merits by telling lies. This is actually, very sadly speaking, deemed as normal in our society. People think that telling lies is very acceptable and people should tell lies whenever they like. The more skillfully they tell lies, the more successful they will be, therefore,  Lao Tzu further says:

“When cleverness emerges,

there is great hypocrisy.”

    Hypocrisy is a form of telling lies to people. Hence, a real saint is described as honest and straightforward in character. I wonder so much that I can only know the merit of not telling lies as a strict rule by studying ancient scriptures in different cultures not by the teaching of people at school or in the society. To be hypocritical, the same as to tell lies, is opposite to the Truth, the root of our pure nature, the root of our spiritual life. Hypocrisy and telling lies will corrupt our root making our spiritual attainment never successful. I did hear from some very so-called spiritual master teaching her followers to tell lies cunningly and cleverly in order to benefit people. It would be a great disaster for me if I never studied ancient scriptures by myself including the Tao Te Ching. Most people do not know what the Truth is. They were born to follow the society full of falsehood and hypocrisy. They can be easily modeled to regard cunning and smart as “good” and "successful" in their corrupted mind. This is exactly the situation we are facing in human history. We need models to tell us how to be good to our family and our country, therefore,  Lao Tzu further says:

“When the six relations are discordant,

there are filial piety and kind affection;

When the country is in chaos,

there are loyal ministers.”

    People cannot get back their pure nature. They do not know what the Truth is. There are problems, abuses and chaos among family members and further to their neighbours and  their society. Up to the government level, there are corruptions and crimes for private interests. In this way, people need to know what filial piety and kind affection should be in the family, as well as what loyal ministers should be when serving for a country. However, if we are all saints having the Truth inside us, we do not need to be taught to behave well to other.

    Since people to the large extent, lose the Truth, they need to know how a saintly person should behave in order to follow in their daily life. This is our situation. Therefore, the ultimate spiritual attainment is to get back the Truth, the pure nature. Then, we do not need to learn from the outside models. Inside of us, we have had the light already that is the ideal Lao Tzu is trying to tell us.