Tao Te Ching 43

The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world. That which has no substance enters where there is no space. This shows the value of non-action.

Teaching without words, performing without actions; that is the Master’s way.
______________________________________________________

The Tao Te Ching is filled with paradoxical teaching. It invites us to see life in a completely different way – inside out and upside down. It challenges Western paradigms at almost every turn.

This teaching is one of the most important to me, at first challenging and then, over time, almost axiomatic. In a country that has embraced preemptive attack as a defensive model, it’s not easy to embrace the idea that gentle things overcome hard things. We know that dripping water can wear away granite and disintegrate concrete, but we have trouble applying that everyday lesson in national and international affairs.

Non-action seems weak if not heretical to anyone who responds viscerally to the bursts of dramatic energy expended by the political “action figures” we presume to admire. How can anything be performed without action, we wonder. Interestingly, however, it doesn’t take most of us long to recall how many important lessons we’ve been taught without words. If we let that analog work in for a while we can come to understand “performing without actions”.

But the movement from the gross to the subtle doesn’t stop there. The Tao insists that we take it as far as it will go – to the point of understanding that that which has no substance enters where there is no space. Let that one soak for a while and see where it leads.